
(lass 'R I l°lh 

Book ■ '■ : ... 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

SLontfOtt: FETTER LANE, EC. 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 




ffltotnfiurflfj: ioo, PRINCES STREET 

Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. 

Eeipjtg: F. A. BROCKHAUS 

£efo lorfe: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

aSombag an* (Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd, 

Toronto: J. M. DENT AND SONS, Ltd. 

Suftgo: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 



All rights reserved 



FORGIVENESS AND 
SUFFERING 

A STUDY OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 



BY 

DOUGLAS WHITE, M.D. 

TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



Cambridge : 
at the University Press 

i9 x 3 




(Camforitrge : 

PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



TO MY WIFE 



PREFACE 

f 1 1HIS little book needs little introduction. 
-**- It has been written in the hope of indicating 
a new point of view, at which the writer has 
himself arrived, but which he has not seen else- 
where described. 

The chief conscious obligations, in respect 
of books, are acknowledged in the course of the 
essay; but perhaps immediate personal influences, 
which cannot be acknowledged, have a more per- 
manent effect on the direction and development 
of thought than the mediate influence of books. 
If some passages from one or more well-known 
works are selected for criticism, this is done in 
order to bring into relief the writer's own stand- 
point, not from any lack of respect for authors 
who are deservedly held in high esteem. 



viii Preface 

To Professor V. H. Stanton, Canon of Ely, 
who was good enough to read the MS and 
proofs, most hearty thanks are due for much 
helpful suggestion and kindly criticism : he must 
not, of course, be held responsible for the opinions 
expressed. 

Other obligations, of a more private character, 
are better suited for private acknowledgement. 



D. W. 



Harrow-on-the-Hill, 
October 1913. 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I 

THE PRESENT POSITION 

Divine forgiveness a permanent concept of religion (p. 1) ; Sin lowers 
man and alienates God (2) ; religious experience needs intelligible 
explanation (3) ; fear of disturbing traditional opinions (4) ; lack of 
definite theory to-day (5) ; understanding does not lessen reverence 
(6) ; largeness of grasp the secret of progress (7) ; a sane optimism (8). 

pp. 1—8 

CHAPTER II 

LANDMARKS OF EARLIER THOUGHT 

No fixed theory in first two centuries (9). Belief in a personal 
Devil (11); Origen's theory of compact with Satan; its philosophic 
and ethical defects ; its prolonged influence (12 — 14) . Anselm breaks 
down current doctrine; his new hypothesis of satisfaction paid by 
man to God (14) ; his great influence on subsequent thought (17) . 
Questions raised by Schoolmen (19) ; Reformers' drastic views ; 
punishment must precede pardon; Socinus denies this; Grotius 
attempts compromise (19 — 21). Luther's view prevails. Penal sub- 
stitution; its difficulties, (1) Philosophic, guilt and penalty; (2) 
Historical, life of Jesus; (3) Theological, implied ditheism (22 — 28). 

pp. 9—28 

CHAPTER III 

MODERN TENDENCIES 

Summary of foregoing theories (29). Judicial equivalence or 
acceptatio (30). Analogy of debt breaks down (31). All these theories 
transactional, not ethical (32) ; latter begin to preponderate, former 
to disappear (33) ; great advance, yet not wholly satisfactory (35) ; 
why the need of suffering ? (36) ; Pantheistic tendency ; immanence 
and transcendence complementary (37). pp. 29 — 37 



Synopsis 



CHAPTER IV 

NATURAL AND MORAL LAW 

Ambiguity of word "Law": natural law a statement of fact, 
moral law a principle of ethics (38 — 40) ; concepts different yet not 
independent (41) ; ordinances based on facts, both in physical and 
moral spheres (42) ; instinct of self-defence in both (44). Consequences 
wrongly interpreted as penalties ; death the natural result of sin (46) ; 
pain restorative, not penal (48) ; moral tendency of social relations 
(50) ; eternal punishment, how misunderstood (51) ; God's justice 
automatic; his Love personal (52). pp. 38 — 52 

CHAPTER V 

FORGIVENESS A PERSONAL RELATION 

God's personal antagonism to evil (53) ; moral evil inseparable 
from persons (54) ; God's attitude one of antagonism, not hatred (55) ; 
antagonism not subversive of love (56) ; our concepts necessarily 
anthropomorphic ; argument from human to divine (57) ; forgiveness 
independent of arbitrary punishment (59) ; repentance and pardon a 
psychological exchange (60). No need for expiation, guarantees, or 
vicarious penitence (63 — 67); Jesus does not face God, but expresses 
Him (68) ; to forgive the repentant is just (69). Forgiveness does not 
contravene natural law, but presupposes it (70) ; it is free but not 
automatic (72); forgiveness intensifies love (74). pp. 53 — 74 

CHAPTER VI 

THE NEED OF SUFFERING 

Jesus reveals God in love, forgiveness, suffering (75, 76) ; cost 
of forgiveness always borne by injured person (77) ; value of pardon 
measured by suffering (80) ; without blood no remission ; thought 
implicit in ancient ritual (81). The passion of God (82) ; impassibility 
defined (83). Love and suffering inseparable (84); passibility not 
opposed to omnipotence (85) ; love and self-expression (86) ; passibility 



Synopsis xi 

of God a necessary outcome of Christian thought (88) ; no real 
philosophic difficulty (91) ; self -limitation of God a necessity (91) . 
Self-sacrifice a joy; but contact with sin painful (92); forgiveness 
not painful, yet reached through pain (93) ; God also is made perfect 
through suffering (94). pp. 75 — 94 

CHAPTER VII 

FORGIVENESS VITAL NOT FORMAL 

Transactions eliminated (95) ; God's attitude unaltered (96) ; the 
"finished work" explained in accord with general sense of N.T. (98) ; 
two objections met (100); "dereliction" discussed (101 — 4). Re- 
capitulation (105) ; self -revelation God's purpose in Jesus (106) ; love, 
suffering, forgiveness — a sequence (107). Older and newer views 
contrasted (110) ; Crucifixion represents an eternal truth (113) ; for- 
giveness the beginning, not the end; brings newness of life (114); 
sacrifice and ensample (115) ; taking of manhood into God ; only one 
way of forgiveness (116). pp. 95 — 116 

CHAPTER VIII 

REFLECTIONS AND HOPES 

A living picture (117). Death of Christ not to be considered in 
isolation (118) ; represents God's passion. Potency of Christ's passion 
not less real, though symbolical (119) ; value of this view to different 
shades of belief (120); universal value of Passion, though in time 
(121); importance of revised doctrine (122), as Christianising world 
(123) and unifying Church (124) . Meaning of authority (126) ; recent 
revolution of thought (127) . pp. 117—128 

EPILOGUE 

The City of God; its houses and citizens; a comparison. 

pp. 129—133 



CHAPTER I 

THE PRESENT POSITION 

Divine forgiveness has always formed the 
central theme of religious thought, and must 
always so continue under man's existing con- 
dition of moral imperfection. It represents an 
instinctive need of man ; springing from a sense 
that he is not what he ought to be, nor what 
God desires that he should be. It is not a 
specifically Christian conception, for the sense 
of need existed long before the Christian era. 
But Christianity did purport to offer and to pro- 
vide a satisfaction of that need, which previous 
systems of religion had entirely failed to supply. 

The desire for forgiveness is common to 
mankind ; but the conceptions of forgiveness 
vary with the conceptions of God. Crude 
and unethical thoughts of God produce crude 
and unethical views of forgiveness. Always and 
everywhere these two things are necessarily 
interdependent. And if in the Christian church 

d. w. 1 



2 Forgiveness and Suffering 

views have prevailed which are impossible for 
us now to accept, this is because the followers 
of Jesus have failed to imbibe the lofty and 
beautiful concept of God which he sought to 
impart. If we wish to reach a right under- 
standing of the mind of Jesus on divine for- 
giveness, we can only succeed by setting our- 
selves to study his teaching about the nature 
of God. 

The hindrance to right relations between 
man and God is two-fold ; for not only do 
men feel a sense of moral degradation on their 
own side, but they are instinctively conscious 
of a divine antagonism; the need of moral re- 
covery and that of personal reconciliation go 
hand in hand. 

Christians in all ages have firmly believed 
that both the divine antagonism and the human 
degradation are done away by the sufferings of 
Christ ; but their conceptions as to how this 
result is achieved have varied very widely, not 
only in the past but up to the present day. 
Thousands indeed have appropriated to them- 
selves the benefits of the Christian religion, 
who have had the most primitive conceptions 
as to the manner in which these benefits 



The Present Position 3 

become available, or as to the process of their 
assimilation; but at the present time the grow- 
ing intelligence of a rising generation demands, 
more than ever before, some rational explana- 
tion of the doctrines which they are asked to 
believe ; and to-day — I say it without hesi- 
tation — the current interpretations of the 
Christian doctrine of God's forgiveness are such 
as to raise a wellnigh insuperable barrier against 
the adoption of a definitely Christian form of 
thought among men of average intelligence. 

I do not suggest that out-and-out Calvinism 
is believed or taught by the clergy of the present 
day, still less that it is accepted by the laity. 
Yet it must be admitted that the mode of 
thought which produced Calvinism is still at 
work to-day ; satisfaction theories are still 
dominant, though the form in which they are 
presented has been greatly modified. It may 
be doubted whether it has even occurred to the 
majority of present-day Christians that there 
can be any alternative. 

The doctrine of penal substitution, intro- 
duced at the Reformation, has few supporters 
at present ; but while there is a general desire 
to avoid this presentation, the usual tendency 

1—2 



4 Forgiveness and Suffering 

is to alter its form rather than its substance ; it 
is still assumed that some form of satisfaction 
to God was necessary which man was powerless 
to render. But what sort of satisfaction was 
required, or how it has been rendered, is left 
indeterminate. In the pulpit, indeed, there is 
a tendency to say as little as possible on the 
subject. Enough must be said, on the one 
hand, to show that belief in the doctrine of 
Atonement is still alive ; on the other, it is 
not desired to disturb the faith of the older 
members of congregations by setting forth a 
new explanation ; and, even in the case of the 
younger members, there is a fear of depriving 
their minds of one form of belief before another 
can be assimilated — a fear, as it were, of pruning 
the tree too early, and exposing it to the danger 
of frost. Both these fears are ill-founded ; it is, 
after all, not so easy to disturb the settled 
opinions of elderly people ; and as for the 
younger persons, they are already exposed to 
doubts and questionings of a more radical kind 
than their elders commonly suspect ; the pressing 
need is that these early misgivings should be 
frankly met and openly dealt with. 

Yet, while timidity of innovation to some 



The Present Position 5 

extent explains the lack of virile teaching in the 
modern pulpit, there is a much more potent 
cause ; namely, that while the theory of penal 
substitution was from many points of view un- 
satisfactory, it was at least definite; and, as 
yet, no very definite theory has grown up to 
replace it. Modern thought on the subject 
has not yet crystallised ; it has assumed no 
concise, pictorial form to the minds of the clergy 
themselves ; and if the teacher's thought be 
misty and undefined, it is hardly likely to leave 
a sharp impression on the mind of the scholar. 

To this it is commonly replied, " No cut-and- 
dried theory of the Atonement can be truly satis- 
factory ; we are dealing with a mystery which 
the human mind cannot grasp in its entirety ; 
it is like the sun to the human eye ; we can see 
its effulgence only, we cannot discern its sub- 
stance." Are we then to abstain from forming 
a big, comprehensive conception of God's atti- 
tude towards us 1 Has He given us the capacity 
of asking large and, as it seems to us, vital 
questions as regards our relations to Him, yet 
barred us at the start from ever answering 
them ? Christian thought must be progressive, 
if it is to escape the risk of becoming obsolete. 



6 Forgiveness and Suffering 

Again, we are told that it is more profitable 
for a Christian to contemplate, now from one 
aspect, now from another, the marvels of God's 
grace, than to form any theory by which it can 
be brought down to the level of our understand- 
ing ; we reverence most that which is beyond 
our grasp. This is the plea of many a reverent 
and thoughtful soul ; and yet I think that even 
this too may be wrong. Think : when did you 
begin to look with most wondering eyes at the 
glories of the star-lit sky, the sun, the moon, 
and all the host of heaven ? Was it before or 
after you had made an attempt to understand 
and appreciate the workings of the solar system ? 
Did a knowledge of the laws and relations of 
the heavenly bodies diminish your wonderment 
at God's creative power ? The question, I think, 
admits of but one answer. The further our 
mind penetrates the mysteries of nature, the 
more wonderful they become ; the more we 
come to know, the wider is the expanse of the 
unknown, and the greater the marvel of the 
partly known. 

As with the material universe, so is it with 
our world of personalities, and so with our 
conceptions of God. As we understand Him 



The Present Position 7 

better, and think of Him more truly, the greater 
by far will be our reverence for His sublimity, 
our trust in His faithfulness, and our adoration 
of His love. For myself, I confess, what I crave 
is a glimpse, a bird's-eye view, if you will, as 
from a distance, of the Divine System, not 
the less spiritual because intellectual : as we 
might see the city of London as a whole from 
high above it ; not that we do not wish to abide 
in the City — whether it be the city of London 
or the city of God — but that having seen it in 
its totality, though imperfectly, we might the 
better henceforth appreciate its details as por- 
tions of the whole. It is this very craving to 
grasp things as a whole, which has wrought 
the revolutions of science ; which has plucked 
observed facts from their dreary isolation of 
pigeon-holes, and placed them, like coloured 
pieces, in the beautiful harmony of Nature's 
picture ; which has taken men, and dates, and 
battles, and by the magic of a master-thought 
has turned them into history ; which has made 
the crust of the earth declare its own story, and 
coaxed their secrets from the stars. 

All these things we know but in part ; each 
answer of nature leads on to further questions, 



8 Forgiveness and Suffering 

which in turn draw their own response. So also 
must be our faith in the world which transcends 
material things — that to a vital question there 
must somewhere be an answer sufficient for us ; 
that when we knock at the door of knowledge, 
it will not remain closed to us for ever. Here 
also, as in other quests, our objective is Truth ; 
to find Truth, we must face our problem squarely, 
undeterred by any mistaken sense of reverence. 
If a conception be false, it were best unmasked. 
Truth will survive handling ; it may be buried 
out of sight for a time ; but it is alive, and will 
presently shoot up, green and fresh, from the 
soil which has hidden it. In such a spirit of 
frank but serious optimism, I invite my readers 
to enter with me into a short study of a great 
problem. 



CHAPTER II 

LANDMARKS OF EARLIER THOUGHT 

It is impossible, and unwise if it were 
possible, to embark on such a quest without a 
glance 1 at the various solutions of the problem 
which have been offered in the past. Men have 
not always thought as they think now. Theories 
quite different from that of penal substitution 
have been advanced, claiming scriptural support ; 
and so large is the thought-range of the apostolic 
age, that even the most diverse and irrecon- 
cileable theories might seem to find some justi- 
fication in one or other of the New Testament 
writings. All the great authors abound in 
figures of speech through which they seek to 
convey their thought ; but their conceptions 
are wider than the figures which illustrate them. 
Each writer speaks in the terms of his own 
mental upbringing, so long as such terms seem 

1 Throughout this chapter my acknowledgements are due 
to H. N. Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement , and 
G. B. Stevens's Christian Doctrine of Salvation. 



10 Forgiveness and Suffering 

adequate ; St Paul in terms of Jewish Law, the 
writer to the Hebrews in terms of the ritual of 
Hebrew sacrifice ; but each of them confessedly 
finds his own terminology inadequate. The Law 
is but the nursemaid who brings pupils to the 
school of Christ ; the sacrifices are not the real 
things but only a dim shadow of the reality. 
Christian thought indeed is like the daffodil; its 
bud is at first enclosed in a flower-case ; but as 
the bud expands, the flower-case has done its pro- 
tective work, and is thrown off. So with these 
writers; their thought could not keep within 
the limits of its early expression; as the one 
expanded, the other passed into obsolescence. 

In thus suggesting that the writers of the 
apostolic age did not mean to tie themselves 
up to any theory of Atonement, I know that 
I am on debated ground ; but when once we 
leave the apostolic, and pass to the sub-apostolic 
age, the case is different. There certainly we find 
an entire absence of any definite theory ; and so 
things remained during the greater part of the 
second century. Not that the matter was absent 
from the mind of Christians of that period ; it 
was indeed the subject of devout meditation 
and beautiful utterance, as the Epistle to 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 11 

Diognetus may exemplify ; but their pearls of 
thought were unstrung; they had no con- 
sciously formulated theory ; their faith was 
simple ; as yet there was no demand for an 
intellectual system. 

One thing, however, bulked large in re- 
ligious thought of that time, which was destined 
to give both colour and shape to Christian 
theory for many a long year; this was the 
Personality of the Devil, the Prince of this 
world, who held and exercised practical sway 
over the wills of men. In the dominance of 
this belief, it was natural that the work of 
Christ should figure as a personal triumph over 
Satan. And so this idea gradually asserts 
itself, till it finds free expression, but not full 
explanation, in the writings of Irenaeus (bp. of 
Lyons 178 — 202). Its development was left 
for the restless creative genius of Origen (fl. 
204 — 253), the greatest Christian thinker of 
that age, whose versatile imagination was free 
from the yet unknown trammels of authority. 
The theory of redemption which he laid down 
fails indeed to meet our modern needs ; even 
to Origen himself, judging from the rest of his 
work, it must have appeared as only a partial 



12 Forgiveness and Suffering 

explanation of the truth ; yet it was destined to 
hold the theoretic field, not indeed exclusively, 
but predominantly, for nearly a thousand years. 
By his scheme of thought the redemption of 
man was effected by means of a compact or 
bargain between God and the Devil ; and we 
must confess that, even regarded as a com- 
mercial transaction, it is by no means above 
ethical criticism. Mankind, by this theory, 
were under the dominion of Satan, who held 
over them the powers, if not the rights, of 
slave-ownership. Having acquired these powers 
not by force but by the consent of man, it was 
right that, if men were to be freed from the 
bondage, an equivalent price should be paid to 
the Devil ; and this price, which God alone was 
able to pay, was nothing else than the death of 
Christ. But although the compact was struck, 
Satan did not realise what he was doing ; not 
only did he overlook the influence which the 
life and death of Christ would exercise upon 
man, but he failed to perceive that, having 
compassed Christ's death, he could not hold the 
soul of Christ, which was superior to death ; 
by the resurrection, therefore, Satan was in 
effect cheated of the product of his bargain. 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 13 

Thus by his ignorance the Devil compassed his 
own downfall ; of this ignorance God took full 
advantage, and paid back Satan in his own coin. 
To the modern mind the picture is gro- 
tesque, quite apart from ethical considerations. 
That God should hold traffic with the Devil is 
to us inconceivable. But the chief reason for 
this is that, unlike our forefathers, we no longer 
believe in a personal Devil. We believe, indeed 
(who does not ?), in personal influences, which 
are all about us, both for good and evil ; but 
the embodiment of evil in the person of a Devil, 
ranking in power second only to the good God 
— this is a belief which we no longer share. In 
spite, however, of so great a change in thought, 
we may note that this sort of belief has not 
yet wholly vanished ; even to-day from pulpit 
and platform you may hear explanations of the 
Atonement which, in the last resort, involve 
the same conception 1 . 

1 In this context cp. Hymns A. & M. 96, v. 5 : 

Upon its arms (the cross) like balance true, 
He weigh'd the price for sinners due, 
The price which none but He could pay, 
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey. 
Is this an echo of the patristic view, or only an adaptation of 
Lc. xi. 21 ( = Mc. iii. 27, Mt. xii. 29. The strong man armed) ? 



14 Forgiveness and Suffering 

Having outlined Origen's theory of re- 
demption, I should be ill serving my readers if 
I left them with the impression that this was all 
that Origen had to say. His teaching in truth 
is full of spirituality ; he dwells insistently on 
personal reconciliation with God, purification of 
life, and the permanent value of Christ's perfect 
manhood. At present, however, we have to 
deal with his formal theory of redemption ; 
and its defects, from a modern standpoint, need 
no emphasizing. Yet the Christian world, as 
a whole, acquiesced in that view for many 
centuries ; not that everybody accepted it, but 
it was never formally demolished till nearly 
1100 a.d. Passing on, therefore, to that date, 
our scene changes from Alexandria to Canter- 
bury; and the gracious figure of Anselm chal- 
lenges our attention. 

In the person of Anselm were combined 
statesman, saint, and scholar ; if Origen gave 
form and system to the theology of the Fathers, 
Anselm heralds the advent of Scholastic thought. 
In him for the first time we find the hypothesis 
of a compact with Satan formally abrogated. 
For Anselm, indeed, the personal Devil still 
exists, but not as disputing sovereignty with 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 15 

God. How (he asks) could the Devil have any 
rights at all in God's world ? God owed the Devil 
nothing at all except punishment, and all the 
more that he had deceived man, and so lured him 
from the path of goodness. It was not God who 
had to make any recompense to the Devil, but 
man who had to make a recompense to God. 
Man by his sin had violated the order of the 
world, and by the same act had personally 
affronted God ; not only must the lost balance 
be restored, but the offended honour of God 
must be satisfied. Now (so thinks Anselm) 
owing to man's sinfulness neither of these 
objects can be achieved by him ; he already 
owes to God the homage of his life ; even if 
this were perfectly rendered, it could not atone 
for the sinful past ; something further is re- 
quired, which must be rendered by man, and 
yet which is beyond man's power to supply. 
The need is supplied by Jesus, the God-Man. 
He is able both to restore the lost order, and 
to satisfy the offended honour of God. True, 
he too, as man, owed God the homage of his 
life ; but, being sinless, he did not pass under 
the sinner's sentence of death. His death, 
therefore, freely offered to God, was of such 



16 Forgiveness and Suffering 

infinite value as not only to balance the moral 
deficit, but also to give satisfaction to the 
Creator for the personal affront. Thus recon- 
ciliation with God has been achieved, without 
any breach of the moral order of the uni- 
verse. 

Sin, then, is an affront to God. Influenced 1 , 
no doubt, by the environment of his own age, 
Anselm attributed to God something of the 
qualities of a great feudal baron ; affronted by 
sin, He requires some personal satisfaction ; 
since man is incapable of rendering this unaided, 
God graciously makes it possible by means of 
the Incarnation. 

The negative side of Anselm's argument 
obtained a speedy acceptance; though com- 
bated by Bernard, it was admitted by Abelard ; 
the death of Christ was no longer accepted by 
Christendom in the sense of a compact with 
the Devil. His positive theory, however, pro- 
foundly as it influenced the whole Scholastic 
age, failed to command the general assent ; 
into the reasons for this failure it is not possible 
here to enter ; to the modern mind one reason 
is sufficient. The argument depends entirely 

1 See Stevens, Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 241. 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 17 

on the postulate that physical death is the 
penalty or result of sin. Take this away and 
the whole formal structure of the theory col- 
lapses. 

To judge rightly, however, of Anselm's con- 
tributions to thought (and they were many) we 
must throw ourselves back into his age and 
understand his relation to it. 

It is, indeed, hardly possible for any modern 
thinker to accept his conclusions in the form in 
which he moulded them ; yet his work was in 
advance of contemporary thought ; it fulfilled 
adequately the theological requirements of his 
own age, and offered fresh food for thought to 
his successors ; he had turned the stream of 
theological thought into an entirely new channel. 
And if, after the lapse of another 800 years we 
have ceased to feel the direct influence of 
his speculation, we must still remember how 
great a boon he conferred on Christian thought 
by his destruction of the unethical theory of a 
compact with Satan. But more than this too. 
For if his positive theory was inadequate, yet 
it contained elements of truth which were 
capable of exerting, and did exert, a beneficent 
influence on future thought. 

d. w. 2 



18 Forgiveness and Suffering 

His, indeed, was the first theoretic advance- 
ment of a satisfaction rendered to God ; but it 
is a superficial view which sees in him the father 
of the Reformation theories ; these, I think, 
would have repelled Anselm almost as much as 
they repel us. Indeed, strange as it may sound, 
I suspect that the undercurrent 1 of Anselm's 
thought was more in line with modern ideas 
than with those of the Reformation ; for, after 
his own fashion, he was the first to express two 
important things ; first, the conception of what 
I may call the moral equilibrium of the uni- 
verse ; and secondly, the personal sensitiveness of 
God towards sin. The terms, indeed, in which 
that sensitiveness are expressed are unfortunate, 
being coloured by the social conditions of his 
own day; yet it was something to have perceived 
it at all. As we proceed, we shall see the signifi- 
cance to ourselves of these two ideas, although 
they need modern interpretation and handling. 

The name of Anselm ushers in the age of 
the Schoolmen. Into their systems of thought 
we cannot here enter. Was the life and death 

1 It is unjust, I think, to label Anselm's theory "commercial." 
The thought of equilibrium invites commercial illustration, in 
the sense of balancing accounts; but the thought runs deeper 
than its illustration. 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 19 

of Christ an absolute necessity for man's salva- 
tion, or could God have found another way ? 
Was the Incarnation devised as a remedy for 
man's sin alone, or was it a necessary step in the 
gradual perfection of the human race, irrespec- 
tive of sin? Both these questions are of deep 
interest. By their opposite answers to the latter, 
Thoma.s Aquinas and Duns Scotus sowed the 
seeds of two conflicting tendencies of modern 
theology. Yet such questions are not on the 
direct line of our present study ; we must pass on 
to the sixteenth century, in which thought again 
becomes creative rather than contemplative. 

By the Reformers, " sin is viewed as a 
"violation of God's inexorable law, and not 
" merely as an affront to His honour. The 
"necessity which now arises is not merely 
"a necessity to vindicate His majesty ; it is the 
"necessity that sin be punished. It is no 
"longer a question of God's dignity or honour, 
"but of His inflexible justice. It is no longer, 
"as with Anselm, a question of satisfaction or 
"punishment, but of satisfaction by punish - 
"ment. If therefore sin is to be forgiven, 
"it must, first of all, be punished 1 ." This 

1 Stevens, Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 152. 

2—2 



20 Forgiveness and Suffering 

is the essence of the Reformation view, of 
which Luther and Calvin are the chief, but 
not the only, exponents. The revolt of Socinus 
(1539 — 1604) from this doctrine, is of interest, 
not only in itself, but as leading up to the 
theory of Grotius (1583 — 1645). Socinus main- 
tained (with Anselm) that sin, indeed, is an 
affront to the majesty of God ; but he also pro- 
pounded that it is perfectly competent for God 
to forgive the affront, if He so pleases, without 
punishment. He condemns as impossible the 
theory of penal substitution, which he also 
considers superfluous. Indeed, for him, the 
necessity of Christ's death disappears entirely, 
in so far as it is regarded as a basis for the for- 
giveness of sins. The declaration of Socinus, in 
fact, constituted a powerful challenge to the 
whole system of current orthodoxy. 

The challenge thus thrown down, is taken 
up by Grotius, the lawyer, in a somewhat un- 
expected manner. He answers that God is the 
Governor of the world, and that He must 
govern on principles of righteousness. The 
abrogation of the right to exact satisfaction 
for sin would produce chaos, although such a 
right need not be exercised in every case. 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 21 

God's right to exact satisfaction was exhibited 
in the death of Christ — whose mission to earth 
is, on this view, regarded as a sort of armed 
demonstration of the rights and righteousness 
of God. God need not indeed exact from every 
man satisfaction equivalent to his sin ; but He 
must do something to maintain the moral order 
of the world which He governs. He must, to 
use the modern useful but elusive phrase, 
vindicate His righteousness. In view of this 
necessity, a striking example is required ; this 
character Christ voluntarily undertakes, and 
thus exhibits to the world the terrible conse- 
quences of sin, in order that man may in future 
choose the path of righteousness. Grotius does 
not consider that Christ paid the penalty of 
man's sin, but that he exemplified it. The 
obvious answer to this proposition is that, if 
the Governor is to uphold law and order, he 
can only do so by punishing the guilty ; if a 
dreadful example be regarded as necessary, the 
choice for that purpose of an innocent person is 
singularly infelicitous. 

Grotius, then, occupied a middle position 
between those who affirmed that God can and 
does forgive without punishment, and those 



22 Forgiveness and Suffering 

who declared that God is bound by the inner 
necessity of His nature, to inflict penalty with 
the full rigour of the offended law. But this 
half-way house was not suited to be a per- 
manent resting-place of thought, particularly 
at such a time ; and already, when the theory 
of Grotius was put forward, theological opinion, 
under the powerful influence of the leaders of 
the Reformation, was steadily setting in the 
direction of punishment with full rigour, as a 
necessary preliminary to forgiveness. 

This view, namely, that God is bound by 
the eternal justice of His nature, to exact from 
mankind the full penalties of sin, had been 
already declared in no doubtful terms. Luther 
(1483 — 1546) boldly plunged into the theory 
from which all previous theologians had shrunk : 
God, being driven by the inherent law of His 
nature to punish sin to its full desert, had 
graciously provided a substitute for the sinner 
in the person of His Son ; on this innocent 
victim He wreaked the full vengeance due for 
sin, thus balancing the account between sinners 
and God. Jesus thus endured the penalty of 
our sins upon the cross ; and as that penalty 
involved damnation, Calvin does not stick at 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 23 

saying that Christ endured the pains of hell. 
This is in fact the unadulterated theory of penal 
substitution. 

How such a theory can ever have been 
acceptable to the human mind it is hard to 
understand ; one can only think that some such 
drastic restatement was needed to countervail 
the conception, then no doubt widely prevalent, 
of a benevolent Deity, whose good nature shrank 
from the necessary exercise of moral discipline. 

But the scheme of Luther will not stand 
examination any more than its predecessors ; 
philosophically it is as unsound as the others ; 
ethically it is repellent. Granted that God is 
eternally just, granted that justice must exact 
the full penalty of sin ; then every sinner must 
himself bear in full the penalty of his own sin. 
The term penalty is meaningless apart from its 
correlative, guilt ; an innocent man cannot 
endure penalty for a guilty man, any more 
than he can appropriate his guilt. Nor are 
matters improved by the voluntary character 
assigned to Christ's sufferings. To suffer volun- 
tarily on behalf of another, to risk or lose life or 
health in order to save another — this is vicarious 
suffering, which we know and understand ; 



24 Forgiveness and Suffei*ing 

vicarious penalty, substitutionary punishment, 
is outside the range of our experience or thought. 
Its advocates suggest the analogy of an innocent 
child, ready and willing to receive a beating 
from his father in the place of his guilty brother ; 
but the father who could thus satisfy his appe- 
tite for vengeance has yet to be found even 
in this imperfect world. And if it sometimes 
happens, in the administration of the law of 
the land, that the innocent suffers for the 
guilty, this is only a miscarriage of justice, 
and does not in the slightest degree satisfy 
the majesty of the offended law 1 . 

The whole conception of penal substitution 
depends for its validity on the presumed isola- 
bility of the sin from the sinner, as if it were a 
thing separable from a person, very much as 
my hat might be removed from my head, and 
placed on another's. But sin is not in this way 
transferable ; guilt is a strictly personal burden, 

1 Under cover of such analogies as these, the doctrine of 
penal substitution may be presented in a less unattractive form ; 
as for instance in one of the Hymns for Infant Minds, by 
A. & J. Taylor (1876) : 

He knew how wicked men had been, 

And knew that God must punish sin ; 

So out of pity Jesus said 

He'd bear the punishment instead. 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 25 

which can in no way be shifted on to another's 
shoulders. Indeed, if we use the word burden, 
it is the burden of a disease, a deformity, a 
cancer. What is required is not an outward 
transference, but an inward cure. Here, then, 
is the first flaw in the doctrine of penal sub- 
stitution, that neither guilt nor its correlative, 
punishment, are transferable ; so that, if it is 
necessary to inflict punishment at all, it must 
be inflicted on the person of the guilty and on 
no one else. But even if this elementary 
difficulty could be eliminated, the theory of 
penal substitution does not even square with 
the facts which it seeks to explain. It is 
claimed that, inasmuch as the wages of sin is 
death, Christ by his death paid in full the 
penalty due to man's sin. But what is meant 
by death in this connexion ? No one can now 
believe that physical death is the result of sin ; 
moreover, if physical death be the penalty of sin, 
then Christ's death does not in fact save us from 
this penalty. But did Christ then suffer eternal 
death, commonly called damnation, in order to 
save us from that penalty % Obviously not. So 
it is not clear, to say the least, in what sense 
Christ did in fact endure the penalty due to 



26 Forgiveness and Suffering 

mankind, any more than it is clear philosophi- 
cally how punishment can be transferred from 
the guilty to the innocent. 

If the doctrine of penal substitution be 
supposed to exhibit the love of God, it does 
so at the expense of even a show of justice ; 
if it exhibits the justice of God, then, since 
justice requires forgiveness, there is left no room 
for love. The difficulties are overwhelming. 

Add to all this that there is not in the life 
or in the death of Jesus a single suggestion 
that he was conscious of the wrath or dis- 
pleasure of the Father. The constant love, 
trust, and obedience of Jesus, throughout his 
life and death, carries with it, as its necessary 
reciprocal, the love, tenderness and good-plea- 
sure of the Heavenly Father; whereas a penal 
interpretation of his sufferings involves the idea 
of strained relations, and postulates displeasure, 
separation, aversion. I am aware that in certain 
quarters such an interpretation is still upheld, 
mainly on the ground of two utterances of Jesus 
himself; with this contention I propose to deal 
later on in detail (p. 100 ff.). But for the present 
no one will deny that throughout the gospel 
history, Jesus is represented, not only as acting, 



Landmarks of Earlier Thought 27 

speaking, and thinking, in absolute harmony 
with the divine will, but as being himself 
conscious of the Father's perfect sympathy, 
favour and cooperation ; the authority which 
he claimed was in virtue of his intimate personal 
understanding of the Father's will (Mt. xi. 27, 
Lc. x. 22) ; the chief reason of the Fathers 
love was his very willingness to lay down his 
life (Jo. x. 17). In face of such a picture of 
harmony, we are asked to believe that in his 
death-agony all this was altered : his Father's 
face turned away in displeasure ; the union 
broken ; the love turned into antipathy. It is 
incredible ; such a view of things turns the life 
of Christ into a monstrous historical anomaly. 

Lastly, we must not leave the doctrine of 
penal substitution without noticing a further 
difficulty which it raises. For if it grates on 
the philosophical and historical sense, it is no 
less shocking to the theological mind. The 
Christian doctrine presupposes absolute unity 
of will and action between the Father and the 
Son ; the Son's abode is in the bosom of the 
Father ; he is the express image of the Father's 
person ; whatever the Father does, that also 
does the Son. Separation, punishment, wrath, 



28 Forgiveness and Suffering 

— such terms are the language of flat ditheism ; 
to a monotheist, incarnation can only be a self- 
expression of God, whereby, as in a mirror, He 
reveals His nature and character to man ; any 
thought of collision, friction, disharmony, be- 
tween God and his self-expression is unthink- 
able ; and not less so from the stand-point of 
Trinitarian theology than from any other. 
Whatever distinctions may be conceivable within 
the Divine nature, these cannot be subversive 
of the unity in which they are rooted ; distinction 
of will, purpose, aim, cannot be allowed. Mono- 
theism is the first axiom of Christianity. It is 
a thing much to be remembered. 



CHAPTER III 

MODERN TENDENCIES 

In the foregoing chapter we have passed 
in brief review the chief guises in which, up to 
the Reformation period, the doctrine of the 
Atonement was presented. We have seen God 
as a Conqueror, triumphing over the Devil ; 
we have seen God as a feudal Baron, affronted 
by the action of his vassals, yet willing to accept 
a suitable reparation ; we have seen God as 
Governor keeping order within His domain by 
means of an exemplary severity, which " vindi- 
cates " his holiness ; lastly we have seen God 
as Judge, meting out to mankind the full and 
just reward of their evil deeds, but mercifully 
substituting another to bear their penalty. 
Between these various presentments, there are 
striking differences ; yet underlying those differ- 
ences, there is an important similarity. 

They differ, in that by the theory of Luther 



30 Forgiveness and Suffering 

there is an inherent necessity in the nature 
of God to punish before He can forgive ; the 
amount of punishment must exactly balance 
the offence. With the other schemes, the 
amount of satisfaction exacted is just so much 
as God is pleased to be satisfied with. In the 
latter case He is an arbiter, who can say "It is 
enough ; stay now thine hand " ; in the former, 
He is a judge, simply administering a law over 
which He has no control. 

In the earlier theology God is able freely to 
determine both the quantity and the quality of 
such satisfaction as He demands ; whatever He 
pleases to accept cannot but be just, seeing that 
Himself has ordered it. This, to the modern mind, 
is acceptable enough, so far as it goes ; but, while 
it leaves the will of God free, it also leaves 
unexplained the principles on which the will 
of God is exercised. By Luther's theology, on 
the contrary, God is bound by a fixed scale of 
judicial equivalence, which He is powerless to 
abrogate or even to modify. Here the under- 
lying principle is clear enough, however un- 
pleasant it may seem ; but we cannot insist 
too much, that if there be an absolute law, 
compelling God to punish sin, then by that law 



Modern Tendencies 31 

the guilty must be punished, and no substitute 
can avail. 

The difficulty, indeed, of the doctrine of 
penal substitution was perceived at an early 
period ; and an attempt was made to circum- 
vent it by setting up the analogy of debt. 
Now it is obvious that a debtor may have his 
debt paid by another, with satisfaction to both 
debtor and creditor ; but if we rest on the 
financial analogy, it is also obvious that the 
matter may be solved another way, namely, 
by the creditor remitting the debt. Moreover, 
we cannot help noticing that when Jesus em- 
ployed the analogy of debt (as he did) he 
portrayed God as acting by remission, and not 
by substitution. " When they had nothing to 
pay, he frankly forgave them both." So that 
the analogy of debt seems to controvert the 
very thesis which it was intended to support. 

But if there are many and wide differences 
between the views of Origen, Anselm, Grotius, 
and Luther, there is still between them all an 
essential similarity. They are all engaged in 
explaining how God overcame a difficulty. The 
difficulty is variously presented, and is solved 
in various ways. But it is always really the 



32 Forgiveness and Suffering 

same difficulty ; and it lies within the being 
of God. These theologians are all dealing with 
a supra- mundane transaction w r hich, in the first 
instance at least, lies entirely outside of man's 
ethical cooperation ; not that the thought of 
any of these reformers was really unethical; 
but their expressed theories, while admitting 
of ethical and spiritual adjuncts, were yet in 
themselves, so far as man was concerned, 
neither ethical nor spiritual. By all these 
writers, the remission of sins is regarded as 
being completed, as it were, " in vacuo," with- 
out reference and in no relation to the persons 
who are to be forgiven ; it is now felt — and 
very properly felt — that if forgiveness of sins 
is to be a spiritual reality, it must from the 
outset come into closer and more immediate 
contact with the human soul than these ex- 
planations imply. 

All transactional theories are primarily 
objective 1 . They spend their main energy, 

1 There is at the present time a tendency to deprecate the 
use of the words "objective" and "subjective," on the ground 
that neither has any content of meaning apart from the other. 
This thesis is elaborated by Dr K. C. Moberly {Atonement and 
Personality, Ch. vn.) ; and Dr Stevens sympathizes with this 
contention, in so far as these terms are open to abuse and 



Modern Tendencies 33 

that is to say, in defining the effect which 
the sufferings of Jesus produced upon the mind 
of God, how they enabled God to square justice 
with mercy, and how thereafter it was possible 
for man to obtain forgiveness. The subjective 
aspect of the matter, — namely, the effect pro- 
duced on man, and the reception by man of 
the proffered salvation — this occupies quite a 
subsidiary position in such speculation. Ac- 
cordingly, the later exponents of the penal- 
substitution theory have attempted to ethicise 
it, to bring it down to the sphere of its human 
operation ; to show how the death of Christ 

misconstruction (Christian Doctrine of tha Atonement, p. 257). We 
can indeed have no sympathy with those who deride ethical or 
emotional views of this doctrine on the ground that they are 
" purely subjective," as if subjective perception of a truth could 
exist apart from its objective validity. On the other hand, 
Dr Moberly seems equally to insist that in the death of Christ 
there was, not only an exhibition of the real (objective) attitude 
of God towards sinners, but also a definite fait accompli, a thing 
actually accomplished, awaiting indeed the perception of men, 
but completed nevertheless independently of their perception 
of it. While therefore in the perception of truth, "objective" 
and "subjective" are each meaningless apart from the other, 
there is still much room for disagreement as to the content of 
the objective truth; and here Dr Moberly seems really to fall 
into line with the earlier rather than with the more modern 
school of theology. 

D. w. 3 



34 Forgiveness and Suffering 

is calculated to bring home to men's consciences 
the grievousness of evil-doing, and turn them 
from sin to righteousness. Having shown the 
effect which Christ's death exercised on God, 
they now proceeded to show the effect which 
it ought to have on man. 

But, while the importance of the man ward 
aspect of Christ's death was looming larger in 
the thoughts of devout meu, they were also 
being increasingly impressed with the philo- 
sophic difficulties of penal substitution. Calvin- 
ism began to be watered down, or even to be 
laid aside, in favour of less harsh views, often 
more or less approximating to the milder, less 
rigid schemes of Anselm or Grotius. 

It was inevitable that in the nineteenth 
century religious thought should transfer itself 
from the speculative to the practical sphere. 
Accordingly we find, specially in the last half- 
century, the conception of penal substitution 
passing into obsolescence, while attention is 
concentrated on Jesus's perfect life of self- 
sacrifice, his entire union of heart with the 
Father, and his overpowering appeal to the 
hearts of men. If (it is urged) God so loved 
the world as to send His Son, then surely He 



Modem Tendencies 35 

was already reconciled to men ; He already 
loved them, and needed not to be warmed into 
love by any sacrifice. Thus the conception 
has become what is usually termed subjective, 
its objective part (as hitherto conceived) having 
been dismissed as either unimportant or untrue. 
The death of Christ, by this view, possesses an 
attractive and absorbing influence on the mind 
of man, drawing him up to God ; but it neither 
exercises, nor did ever exercise, any influence 
over God, by way of propitiation or alteration 
of His attitude towards men. The love of God, 
as exhibited in Christ, is eternal ; Christ is its 
expression, not its cause. Thus the modern 
conception of redemption has become an ethical 
one ; mathematical, legal, and official analogies 
have become obsolescent. The love of Christ 
redeems the world, by drawing men into the 
paths of holiness and self-sacrifice. Redemption 
has become, for us, a " spiritual process " rather 
than " a superhuman transaction " x ; we prefer to 
emphasize the truths of Divine Immanence, and 
to leave alone the fantastic transcendentalism 

1 J. M. Wilson, The Gospel of the Atonement, p. 146. No 
student can afford to miss this book, which consists of the Hulsean 
lectures for 1898. 

3—2 



36 Forgiveness and Suffering 

of a bygone age ; to ponder over the relation 
of God with the human soul, rather than to 
speculate on the internal mysteries of the Divine 
nature. 

From the above-sketched point of view, 
much has been written which is beautiful, 
spiritual, invigorating, and above all, true. 
And yet I feel that it is not the whole truth. 
It fails to satisfy, because it leaves unanswered 
certain vital questions. Why was it that 
"Christ must needs suffer"'? What is the 
meaning of this necessity of suffering (Set 
7ra0elv) so often referred to in the Gospels 
and Acts 1 ? If it be answered, "We admit 
that it was necessary that Christ should suffer, 
though we cannot see the reason why ; the 
mysterious necessity of suffering, not for Christ 
alone, but for ourselves also, obtrudes itself 
upon our notice ; we must accept for a fact 
what we cannot fathom with our understand- 
ing," I reply, If Christ died for our sins, then 
it is a fact of ultimate importance. To aban- 
don its interpretation is to give up the main 
struggle of theology ; it is a counsel of despair, 

1 Mt. xvi. 21, Mc. viii. 31, Lc. ix. 22, xvii. 25, xxiv. 7, 26, 46 
[Jo. iii. 14, xii. 34], Ac. xvii. 3. 



Modern Tendencies 37 

a confession of failure. The meaning of Christ's 
sufferings is the very nucleus of the Christian 
system. At the least we must have a working 
theory of it, something round which we can 
weave our thought. As long as people could 
accept one or other of the older interpretations, 
so long they had an intellectual background 
to their faith ; it formed an anchorage to their 
mind, so long as the anchor held ; but now, for 
us, the anchorage has failed, and it is felt that 
we are drifting on a sea of doubtful speculation, 
while the tide of modern tendency is setting 
steadily towards the shoals of pantheism. It 
is in the hope of pointing to a better anchorage 
that this book is written ; it can only succeed, 
if it helps towards a clearer and truer concep- 
tion not only of the Divine dealings with man, 
but of the Divine Being Himself. The doctrine 
of Divine Immanence alone will not satisfy the 
mind. There is still a theology, as well as a 
mythology, of Divine Transcendence. 



CHAPTER IY 

NATURAL AND MORAL LAW 

Before we can get a clear view of our 
subject, we must have a sharp conception of 
what we mean by the terms in which we ex- 
press ourselves. Certain terms always enter 
into the discussion of this problem, which lead 
to hopeless confusion because of ambiguity in 
their meaning ; such words are Law, Punish- 
ment, Evil. 

What, for instance, do we mean by Law ? 
We speak of the laws of nature and of the 
moral law 1 ; the use of the same word blinds us 
to the fact that we are talking of two things 
which not only are dissimilar, but do not even 
belong to the same category of thought. Not 
uncommonly you may hear a preacher say : 
" The laws of nature recoil with certainty on 
the man who disobeys them ; so God's moral 
law will certainly recoil on the disobedient ; 
be sure your sin will find you out." It sounds 

1 I use the term "moral law" in its ordinary sense, as 
summarizing the dictates of the moral conscience. 



Natural and Moral Law 39 

well, but it is a double untruth. The laws of 
nature are statements of sequences which always 
happen ; of particular forces which always and 
everywhere produce a certain result. You 
cannot disobey, cannot even think of disobey- 
ing, a law of nature ; it is self-acting. An 
architect may build a bridge not strong enough 
to support the train which is to cross it ; his 
wrong calculation may result in death and 
destruction. But he has not broken the law 
of nature. The law has acted ; the bridge, the 
train, the architect's reputation, have all been 
broken ; the only thing which is not broken 
is the law of action and reaction. You can 
neither break these laws, tamper with them, 
nor dodge them ; they are self-acting, always 
and every where. We conquer nature not by 
obeying it, but by understanding it ; it is even 
a solecism to talk of obeying the laws of nature ; 
for we have no choice ; the laws are merely 
compendious statements of fact. The moral 
law is widely different ; this consists of what is 
termed the moral imperative ; it may be to 
some extent codified and externalized, as in 
the decalogue ; yet the reason why it com- 
mands the consciences of men is that it comes 



40 Forgiveness and Suffering 

not from without, but from within. But here 
men have the power of disobedience ; " Thou 
shalt " may be countered by "I will not," 
" Thou shalt not " by " I shall." 

Thus by the word " Law " we express two 
widely different conceptions ; so different that 
it is hard to see between them any point of 
contact ; they seem almost to occupy separate 
planes of thought. 

Perhaps the origin of the confusion may be 
traced to that poetic license, whereby the in- 
animate creation is represented as obeying the 
behests of the Creator, as if endowed with 
consciousness. Examples of this abound in the 
Psalms, as, for instance, in Ps. civ., where the 
whole creation is pictured as waiting on the 
Divine command. These are figures of speech, 
and as such possess both beauty and value ; 
but both are destroyed by the advent of 
literalism. The sea and tides work in accord- 
ance with the Divine will ; to suggest that 
they obey the Divine will is to use a figure of 
speech ; for the word obedience, if literally 
used, implies possible disobedience. So also, if 
we talk of human beings obeying the laws of 
nature, we must remember that the expression 



Natural and Moral Law 41 

is a loose one ; for there is really no question of 
obedience or disobedience ; the laws are self- 
acting. Man's moral life, on the contrary, is 
wholly taken up with obedience or disobedience 
to the dictates of his conscience ; moral life is 
a continual choice. It would appear then as 
if natural law and moral law are so different in 
their nature and scope as to have nothing in 
common ; they are not only different, they are 
hardly even comparable. One is tempted, in- 
deed, to wonder whether they have any relation 
to each other, operating as they do on different 
planes of thought and experience. 

Yet, widely distinct as are the two senses of 
the single word " Law," there is a connecting 
link between the two ; for the regulations of 
society are based on the experience of nature. 
The child is taught by its mother not to do 
certain things, because she knows that certain 
results will happen ; if the child plays with 
fire, it will be burned ; if it eats unripe fruit, 
indigestion will ensue ; if it tells a lie, the 
results of that lie will affect both child and 
mother. Thus there are fixed laws (natural 
sequences) in respect of inorganic nature, in 
respect of physiology, in respect of social and 



42 Forgiveness and Suffering 

moral relations ; and the laws (ordinances) of 
the family, society and state, are based on a 
recognition of the natural laws in their various 
spheres of operation. 

The laws of gravitation include in their 
scope all nature, inorganic and organic, living 
and lifeless ; gravity conditions the lives of 
plants and animals as well as their environ- 
ment. Yet, while these laws give condition to 
the life and movement of all living things, they 
cannot be said to hamper such movements. 
We cannot follow, for instance, the eminent 
author 1 who has spoken of flowers growing " in 
the teeth of gravity," as if gravity were a crush- 
ing force against which the flower has to struggle. 
Gravity is a necessary condition of the flower's 
upward growth ; without gravity, there were no 
upwards. Similarly all our own movements and 
actions are conditioned by gravity ; gravity con- 
ditions the education of the senses which direct 
those actions — muscular sense, sense of position, 
sense of weight. Hence it is absurd to talk of 
any action of ours as "in defiance of the laws 
of nature " ; for the fixity and self-activity of 

1 Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 
p. 131 (13th ed.). 



Natural and Moral Law 43 

nature's laws are the basis of all our physical 
and intellectual life and progress. 

But besides such laws of universal applica- 
tion, there are other laws which embrace in 
their scope vital processes as distinct from non- 
vital. Thus there is the law of action and 
reaction between the bodily powers of man and 
the poisons which may enter his system. The 
advent of certain germs will cause his system 
to react in certain ways ; through such experi- 
ence of action and reaction we discover the laws 
(general principles) of health and disease. When 
these laws are sufficiently understood, we can 
then frame regulations by obedience to which 
dangers of infection may be reduced or in some 
cases eliminated. Medical ordinances are thus 
based upon knowledge of the laws of pathology 
— one of the divisions of " natural law " ; by 
voluntary obedience to these ordinances the 
health of the body may be preserved and the 
life of the individual prolonged. Our rules of 
health follow in the wake of our understanding 
of its laws ; the laws are themselves self-acting, 
and not subject to our control ; the rules are 
ordinances which we may follow or neglect as 
we please. So also the spiritual life is lived 



44 Forgiveness and Suffering 

under the government of law — law none the 
less natural because spiritual. In this sphere 
also certain results follow on certain actions. 
This line of conduct conduces to spiritual health, 
that line to spiritual disease and death. The 
spiritual life, no less than the natural, of which 
it is the highest stratum, must be nourished 
and preserved from adverse influences. In the 
bodily life we possess the instinct of self- 
preservation ; we instinctively put out our 
hand to avoid a blow, instinctively flinch from 
bodily pain, instinctively draw back from fore- 
seen danger. Nor is it otherwise with the 
spiritual life ; in it also we have the instinct 
of self-preservation. But as the spiritual life 
is deeper and more fundamental, so its dangers 
are less palpable and more complex. The 
spiritual instinct has to be a delicate instru- 
ment, sensitive to the approach of harmful in- 
fluences such as tend to impair or destroy the 
spiritual vitality. 

The spiritual life is not a figment of the 
imagination ; it is no less real, and more funda- 
mental, than our bodily life ; if we call it 
"supernatural," we only mean that it is the 
highest manifestation of the natural. And the 



Natural and Moral Law 45 

self-preservative faculty for this higher, in- 
tangible part of ourselves is called Conscience. 
Conscience tells us, " This way lies life." It is 
only a compelling force in so far as we de- 
liberately choose that it shall be. To avoid or 
neglect its warning is to court spiritual disaster. 
The instinct weakens with disuse ; the defences 
of the spiritual life dwindle, as its dangers 
multiply. It is a natural law which tells us 
that the result of sin is spiritual illness, and 
that in the last resort, the wages of sin is death. 

This is a law of our spiritual nature, and 
on the basis of this law are laid down the 
ordinances, Thou shalt do this, and, Thou shalt 
not do that. The natural law that sin leads 
to death is simply a fact ; it does not ask for 
our obedience or disobedience ; it is self-acting. 

Thus we perceive that the operation of 
natural law, from its highest to its lowliest 
sphere, is, as it were, a game of consequences. 
The consequences in all cases are natural, con- 
gruous, inexorable. The bridge which is con- 
structed for a stress of fifty tons breaks down 
under a hundred ; the human body constituted 
to resist a given dose of virus, gives way under 
a greater dose ; the man who partakes of moral 



46 Forgiveness and Suffering 

poison becomes a moral invalid, and is on the 
road to spiritual death. These are all simple 
facts ; nothing can alter them. 

I have called these results consequences. 
Others call thern by different names ; some call 
them punishments. The engineer is punished for 
his faulty calculations ; the invalid is punished 
for exposing himself to infection ; the wastrel is 
punished for his sin. But if you use the term 
punishment, be sure you know the meaning of 
the word. 

The word punishment has a moral reference, 
and implies moral responsibility in its object. 
For this reason we could not say that the bridge 
(of my illustration) is punished for its weakness; 
for punishment the responsible engineer had 
to be introduced. Again, in case of the illness, 
we had to suppose that the victim had culpably 
exposed himself to infection. In all cases the 
use of the word punishment tends to obscure 
the fact that each of the disasters is a necessary 
sequence ; the processes are self-acting ; God's 
special intervention is needless ; the results are 
automatic, not apart from His will, but by His 

will. 

By its self-acting quality, therefore, God's 



Natural and Moral Law 47 

method of dealing with moral failure differs 
from what we customarily term " punishment," 
as inflicted by human authority. Our punish- 
ments, whether in the family or the state, are 
arbitrary in character. With us it is a question 
of judging very imperfectly, and often quite 
wrongly, the heinousness of the moral offence, 
and then selecting a penalty which we deem 
suitable. Our sublime object is to make the 
punishment fit the crime. It were better, 
indeed, to make the punishment fit the criminal, 
for we are punishing the person, and not his 
actions ; but then we cannot see the inside of 
the criminal's mind, and we must judge him by 
his overt actions. Our punishments, therefore, 
are arbitrary and external ; God's judgement is 
self-acting and internal. Sin fulfils its own 
punishment ; justice is axiomatic. What then 
is the mode of God's judgement and punish- 
ment ? It takes effect as spiritual degeneracy 
and alienation from God. And the final end of 
such separation from God must be total death, 
since God is the source and upholder of 
all life. 

Some, of course, will object that such a 
process does not, or need not, involve pain 



48 Forgiveness and Suffering 

to the punished ; vengeance in its popular sig- 
nificance has gone ; the sinner is not made to 
smart. But God's object is not to inflict pain 
on the unrepentant sinner. Such revenge con- 
tains the elements of hatred and cruelty, which 
have no place in the nature of God. The 
doctrine of eternal torment of the damned — 
torment as useless as it is eternal — no longer 
carries weight, because nobody believes it. God 
does not smite the sinner from without ; the 
process works from within. When the sinner 
awakens to the true significance of his situation, 
then he feels the pain ; when his spiritual con- 
sciousness is roused from anaesthesia, then he 
feels the smart of his self-inflicted wounds ; 
then, indeed, there is pain ; this pain is of God's 
determination, and its action is restorative. 
God inflicts no pain without a moral purpose. 
If there is in a man's soul capacity for such 
pain, there is of necessity a corresponding 
capacity for reform. It is the pang of the 
prodigal's heart that drives the prodigal home 
to his Father. 

This is, I believe, in the last resort, the 
object of all human punishment, arbitrary and 
imperfect though it be. When the mother 



Natural and Moral Law 49 

punishes her child, it is, or ought to be, with 
a single eye to the child's restoration to good- 
ness : otherwise it is mere senseless revenge. 
In the case of criminal justice, the issue is 
obscured, because it seeks not only to punish 
the offender, but to deter others from the like 
offence ; even so, the object of criminal punish- 
ment is more and more regarded as restorative 
rather than retributory. Yet between parent 
and child, the issue is a more strictly personal 
one ; and it is from this relation that we may 
obtain the closest picture of God's dealings with 
ourselves. Now the parent's chastisement is 
wholly directed towards awakening in the child 
a sense of repentance for the wrong done. If 
it fails of this, it has been absolutely useless. 
So also is it with the Father in Heaven ; we 
cannot think of Him inflicting pain in mere 
vindictive anger. Such retribution as falls on 
the evildoer, falls on him for reclamation, not 
retaliation. And such external retribution, 
when it does come, comes through the natural 
social tendency which was summarised by Jesus 
himself when he taught that " with what 
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you 
again " ; or simply, People will behave to you 
d. w. 4 



50 Forgiveness and Suffering 

as you behave to them — a generalisation which, 
even from a utilitarian standpoint, commends 
the golden rule, "As ye would that men should 
do unto you, even so do unto them." 

Now, though such external retribution tends 
to fulfil itself in human society, yet it is not 
the result of an automatic machinery. It is a 
social tendency, not a " natural law." The law, 
however, that sin leads to death, is self-acting. 
Quite apart from any penalties inflicted from 
without, every man carries within himself a 
perfect register of his own deeds ; his present 
spiritual state is the complete result of his past ; 
for better or for worse he is the product of his 
own work. He needs no external judgement. 

I have attempted to show that God's sys- 
tem of distributive justice is self-acting; it is 
part of the self-acting Law of Nature ; it has 
nothing arbitrary or artificial about it ; it does 
not necessarily contain any element of casti- 
gation or pain ; yet it fulfils the strictest canons 
of justice ; and it is sufficients 

But, someone will say, what then of "Eternal 
punishment " ? What of the worm that dieth 
not and the fire which is not quenched ? My 
answer is that these figures used in the gospels 



Natural and Moral Law 51 

have been falsely interpreted. There is an eter- 
nal fire, and there is an eternal punishment ; 
but neither of them answers to popular thought. 

In the nature of God there is an inherent 
antagonism against wrong-doing. It is an 
eternal antagonism, because it lives in the 
thought of God. It is fitly represented as an 
eternal fire. It burns up, always and certainly, 
whatever reaches it of an inflammable kind. 
" The chaff he will burn with fire unquench- 
able." The fire is eternal ; the chaff is not. 
The chaff is burnt up in a moment ; the fire 
goes on. The destruction of the chaff is per- 
manent, and in this sense its fate is properly 
described as eternal. The picture of the eternal 
fire contains in it no suggestion of torture, but 
an assurance that nothing that is evil can live 
before the presence of God. 

So far, then, we have been discussing the 
justice of God, as operating through the laws 
of cause and effect, which He has imposed on 
the world, both in the physical and spiritual 
spheres. The justice of God is eternal and 
unalterable ; it is the fixed principle of our 
spiritual being ; it is the law of Spiritual 
Gravity. But while this is, as far as it goes, 

4—2 



52 Forgiveness and Suffering 

a true account of the matter, it gives us only a 
kind of scientific view of the mode by which 
God's justice comes into operation ; it intro- 
duces us to a cold self-acting machinery, insti- 
tuted, doubtless, by God ; but it fails to bring 
us into warm contact with God Himself; it is 
not religion. 

Yet we shall have gained something, if, 
before we enter the confines of personal religion, 
we have learnt to think aright about the facts 
of our spiritual environment, the things which 
form the background and circumstance of our 
religious life ; thus only can we escape from the 
confusion of thought whereby love appears to 
come into collision with law, punishment with 
forgiveness, mercy with justice. For love is 
not opposed to law, nor mercy to justice. 

The fixed laws of cause and effect, then, of 
which we have spoken, whether in the spiritual 
or material realms, are, as it were, the garment 
in which God clothes Himself in His dealings 
with man ; in that garment He stands before us 
half- revealed, but also half-concealed. Hitherto 
we have considered this garment alone ; but 
within the garment there beats the Heart of 
God, and above there smiles a Face. 



CHAPTER V 

FORGIVENESS A PERSONAL RELATION 

We now direct our thought to God as a 
living Being ; transcendent indeed, yet not 
unintelligible ; exercising the functions of 
thought and will in a manner which, though 
extending beyond, is yet in line with our 
understanding. His holiness stretches over our 
horizon, yet what we see of it, we comprehend ; 
His antagonism to evil is greater than we 
can imagine, yet of the same nature as our 
imagining. 

Antagonism to evil ! What do we mean 
by evil ? for the very word evil is used in 
different senses. A man may be bad, or an 
egg may be bad. Both imply a standard set 
up in our mind — one for the man, another, 
quite different, for the egg. An earthquake 
may be spoken of as evil, because of its un- 
fortunate effects on its victims. But neither 



54 Forgiveness and Suffering 

the egg nor the earthquake possesses any moral 
qualities ; and only moral evil finds antagonism 
in God. 

What do we mean when we say that God is 
antagonistic to sin ? Do we mean that He is 
opposed to an abstraction ? God deals with 
persons, not with abstractions. We want to 
know what is His attitude to persons, for 
religion is a personal thing. It is commonly 
said — and there is no more misleading catch- 
word — that God hates the sin, and loves the 
sinner. But moral evil has no existence apart 
from a moral agent. Sin has no meaning inde- 
pendently of its author ; the moral value of a 
deed lies not in the deed itself, but in the 
person of the doer. If God is to hate any- 
thing or anybody, it must be the sinner ; for 
it is with the sinner that He has relations. 
Does God then love and hate the same person 
at the same time ? The paradox arises from 
the use of the term hatred, which denotes to 
our mind something inconsistent with our best 
conception of God ; the word is flavoured with 
human frailty ; it reeks of passion, cruelty, 
malevolence ; and these have no place in 
the divine nature. The word antagonism is 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 55 

uncoloured by these things, and may rightly 
express the Divine attitude to evil-doers. He 
loves all men, and yet is in antagonism to 
wicked men. A simple example from human 
relations will point my meaning. Suppose, 
reader, that you have a son who has lied or 
stolen. What will be your attitude towards 
your boy, so long as he maintains the lie or 
conceals the theft ? You may say indeed, 
"I hate the lie, but love the liar," or "I hate 
the theft, but love the thief" ; yet such ex- 
pressions, though they mean something to your- 
self, are hardly calculated to illuminate others. 
We want to get at the psychology of the thing. 
Your heart may be surcharged with love for 
your son; normally the current of love flows from 
one to the other in full circulation ; but now it 
is interrupted ; his lying or stealing has altered 
the relations between you. By his action, you 
may say, the boy has cut himself off from your 
love ; the change is on his side, not yours. But 
while you say this, you are conscious that not 
only is the boy's relation towards you altered, 
but your relation to him is altered too. The 
new situation is one of mutual antagonism. 
This is not a negation of mutual love, but an 



56 Forgiveness and Suffering 

interruption of its activity. The shadow of 
his sin has fallen on both of you. As the love 
is mutual, so the antagonism is mutual also. 
Before relations can be restored there must be 
an act of forgiveness on your part as well as 
of penitence on his. Not only is he in an- 
tagonism to you, but you are in antagonism to 
him. And this, though you each love the other 
deep down in your hearts. So also, in my 
belief, is the case with God. When a man sins, 
he not only cuts himself off from the active 
love of God, but he also brings upon himself 
active antagonism from God's side. God loves 
all men ; but towards the unrepentant wrong- 
doer that love is inoperative ; the antagonism 
on man's part brings into action an antagonism 
from the side of God ; not a malevolent, but a 
holy antagonism, by reason of which it is truly 
said that ' ' God is angry with the wicked every 
day." 

Our relations with God, whether in aliena- 
tion or in forgiveness, involve a psychological 
process. They cannot be understood in terms 
of commerce or of the law-courts, but only in 
psychological terms. God is a spirit ; only by 
our spiritual nature do we come into contact 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 57 

with Him. Hence our conception of God must 
be, not anthropomorphic in the cruder sense, 
but anthropopsychic ; and conversely, we must 
conceive of man as theopsychic, if he is capable 
of personal relations with God. 

It follows, that if we are to understand the 
forgiveness of God, we must think of it along 
the lines of human forgiveness, and draw our 
conclusions as to the former from a careful 
survey of the latter. 

Human forgiveness, then, is a spiritual pro- 
cess ; we are familiar with it, and it is capable 
of analysis. When we speak of divine forgive- 
ness, do we mean the same thing or something 
different ? Surely the same ; for here is our 
chief point of spiritual affinity with God. Yet 
from the speculation of earlier theology, one 
would imagine that between man and man for- 
giveness means one thing, but between God 
and man quite another. Man's forgiveness — in 
our higher understanding — is free, noble, un- 
selfish, without money or price ; is not God's the 
same? 

The identity in kind between human and 
divine forgiveness lies at the root of the teach- 
ing of Jesus. Human forgiveness he regards, not 



58 Forgiveness and Suffering 

as an analogy of the divine, but as an adequate 
picture of it, just as the ideal relation of human 
fatherhood is a fit representation of God's. 
" Our Father," he tells us to pray, " forgive us. . . 
as we forgive." "If ye forgive not... neither will 
your Father forgive you." 

How does he describe the Father's attitude 
towards His lost children ? In terms of the 
human father. The lost coin, the lost sheep, 
the lost son — these constitute an ascending 
series, by which we may rise from the analogy 
to the reality ; from things wholly material to 
things wholly spiritual ; from the finding of a 
coin to the recovery of a soul. It is clear that, 
according to Jesus, we may safely argue from 
human forgiveness to the divine. Along this 
road, if anywhere, we shall find light. 

Let us follow it further. Once again, your 
son has lied. He persists in his lie, though you 
know it to be false. An antagonism has sprung 
up on both sides, so that mutual love ceases to 
be operative. What is required to heal the 
breach ? Will a suitable punishment put things 
right % You may flog your boy and leave him 
unrepentant ; things are worse than before ; 
you have played your trump card, and lost. 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 59 

Or, without any flogging, the boy may come 
penitent and unlock his heart to you — tell me, 
parent, will you say you cannot forgive till you 
have flogged ? Nay, the door of your heart 
opens, for your love cannot resist the filial call. 
External punishment may, if judiciously ad- 
ministered, prove a salutary moral discipline ; 
but it does not purchase the forgiveness. For- 
giveness may come without punishment, or 
punishment without forgiveness ; they are not 
complementary, nor does the one flow from the 
other. The only penalty which is necessary, 
which always descends, is the self-acting 
penalty; the boy's wrong action has so far 
lowered his spiritual vitality, and set back his 
spiritual life. If he is to recover, he must 
retrace his footsteps ; and this recovery dates 
from the turning-point of repentance ; the 
father's forgiveness nurses the delicate plant 
of penitence into the fulness of spiritual life. 
But artificial penalty is no part of the forgive- 
ness ; free forgiveness is independent of all such 
punishment. Forgiveness is an internal, psychic 
process ; punishment is non-psychic and ex- 
ternal. 

Forgiveness means the re-establishment of 



60 Forgiveness and Suffering 

cordial relations between estranged persons ; 
it is a two-sided proceeding, in which both 
parties must cooperate ; the forgiving spirit 
must be present on one side, and the repentant 
spirit on the other ; only by repentance can 
the offender become forgiveable ; towards the 
forgiveable 1 forgiveness is an act of both mercy 
and justice. 

Forgiveness is not the same as forgivingness. 
You may adopt and maintain a forgiving atti- 
tude towards your enemy, and yet forgiveness 
may be impossible ; forgiveness, like any other 
gift, may be refused ; the will to forgive must 
meet the will to be forgiven. Forgiveness 
implies psychological exchange ; it is a mutual 
act. Forgivingness is not an act but an atti- 
tude ; and it is ineffectual until met by a 
responsive attitude on the other side. 

We have arrived, then, at a point from which 
we see human forgiveness as a free spiritual 
process, whereby alienated persons again become 
reconciled and reunited. It is independent of 
anything in the way of artificial or arbitrary 
penalty. 

Are we prepared to transfer this conception 

1 See Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 56. 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 61 

in its entirety to the divine forgiveness ? Is 
our thought so in harmony with the divine 
that we can safely postulate this and nothing 
more as the principle of God's forgiveness \ Is 
not our concept of forgiveness fogged by a sense 
of our own sinfulness, and spoilt by our failure 
to plumb the depth of God's antagonism to sin ? 
Is not the whole thing anthropomorphic ? 

First, the anthropomorphism. We are an- 
thropomorphic — or anthropopsychic as I prefer 
to say — when we conceive of God in terms of 
our human selves, our human thoughts, our 
human relations. What else can we do ? Our 
only alternative is to say that God is not only 
unknowable, but unthinkable ; to think at 
all, either of God or nature, implies anthropo- 
morphism ; for we can only conceive of that 
which is without in terms of that which is 
within. Anthropomorphism may be, and often 
has been, crude ; but it is purged when we 
grasp that God is Spirit 1 . If man can grow 
like God, then God must be like the best in 
man. If man can be theopsychic, then God 
must be anthropopsychic. To deny it is to deny 

1 See W. Scott Palmer, An Agnostic's Progress, p. 123 ff. The 
book is pleasant reading and highly suggestive throughout. 



62 Forgiveness and Suffering 

any possible point of contact between God and 
man ; — is in effect not agnosticism but atheism. 
So far as we are concerned, there is no God, if 
we are necessarily lacking in points of possible 
contact with Him. It is a necessity of our 
nature to conceive of God in the terms of our 
human spirit; we can do no other. Do we 
conceive of God as powerful ? Anthropomorphic. 
As just % Still anthropomorphic. As loving ? 
It is anthropomorphism gone crazy. 

Yet Jesus was the most anthropomorphic 
teacher that ever lived. How does God love ? 
As the father loves the prodigal son. How 
does God forgive ? " Forgive us as we forgive." 
Nor is this merely a loose analogy, or a vague 
similitude ; in Jesus's teaching human forgive- 
ness is not only a similitude, but a condition of 
the divine ; " for if ye forgive not... neither will 
your Father forgive you." The very word 
Father is saturated with anthropomorphism ; 
yet the fatherhood of God is the unalterable 
basis of Christian thought. By the divine 
spirit alone (so thinks St Paul) can we cry 
"Father." So strong is his grasp of this 
central fact, that he inverts the history of 
thought, and finds that God's fatherhood is 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 63 

the archetype — He is the Father, from whom 
all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named. 

Granted, however, that the principle of 
forgiveness is the same in God and man ; it 
may, nevertheless, be urged that God's per- 
fection introduces an incalculable element when 
it comes into touch with man's imperfection. 
God may require more from man, before He 
can forgive, than man requires from his fellow- 
man. It may be our own sinfulness which 
bars us from demanding full expiation. " For- 
bear to judge, for we are sinners all." May it 
not be impossible for the Sinless One to forgive, 
as we forgive, without penalty ? This also, I 
think, is ruled out by the teaching of Jesus. 
According to him the kingdom of heaven is 
a kingdom of free forgiveness. The debtor 
servant, of the parable, was freely forgiven, and 
this very fact bound him freely to forgive his 
fellow-servant. God's free forgiveness is for 
Jesus the archetype of human forgiveness. 
The higher we go in the scale of human good- 
ness, the fuller we find the exercise of free 
forgiveness ; the holier the man, the readier 
is his forgiveness, and the remoter any thought 
of penal infliction. Human forgiveness may 



64 Forgiveness and Suffering 

be imperfect, but it is on the right lines; where 
it is most free, there it is most perfect. 

Again, you may urge, human repentance 
is imperfect. It is good enough for our fellow- 
men, but not good enough for God. He must 
have some guarantee of the depth and value 
of our repentance. To this I answer, once 
again, it is disallowed by the teaching of Jesus. 
His disciples asked, "Are we to go on forgiving, 
time after time, when the offence is repeated 
again and again ? " " Certainly," said Christ, 
"go on indefinitely." There, surely, no guarantee 
of good conduct is implied. Rather is forgive- 
ness looked on as the fount and origin of 
future well-doing ; it is the spiritual basis of 
an amended life ; it is the prop of failure, the 
source of success. And yet the idea that God 
requires some guarantee of our future good 
conduct, before He can forgive, holds promi- 
nence to-day ; Christ, by a new hypothesis, is 
portrayed as the guarantor, or guarantee, to 
God of our future conduct. And so, by a 
different route, we are dragged back into the 
law-courts and the endless welter of trans- 
actional hypothesis ; for by this theory, too, 
God requires from man a guarantee which, 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 65 

in the nature of the case, man cannot provide. 
A similar criticism, in my judgement, is incurred 
by those who, while ostensibly rejecting any 
idea of a penal substitution, seek to replace it 
by what they term a representative penitence ; 
the suggestion being that Christ, unifying 
himself with the whole human race, and taking 
them, as it were, under his wing, offered to 
God a perfect penitence for all. This manner 
of thought, the chief exponents of which have 
been McLeod Campbell and Moberly, is not 
only nebulous in itself, but it rests upon an 
insecure foundation. How can Christ offer any 
penitence at all ? Penitence is the sorrow felt 
by the wrongdoer for his offence ; repentance 
is a personal forsaking of sin, and a re-direction 
of life and will ; for Jesus neither of these was 
possible. No one can repent of sins not his 
own, or experience penitence for the sins of 
others. Moberly, I know, thinks otherwise ; 
he takes the matter even further ; he says 
that only the perfect man can perfectly repent ; 
that for one who has sinned perfect repentance 
is impossible, just because he has sinned and 
thereby damaged his spiritual powers 1 . This 

1 R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, pp. 117 ff. and 
D. w. 5 



66 Forgiveness and Suffering 

is sheer paradox, and to me, I confess, conveys 
no meaning. It is as if he should say, "No 
man who has had enteric fever can perfectly 
recover, because his bodily tissues have been 
injured by the complaint ; the only person who 
can perfectly recover is the man who has never 
had the disease " ; which is nonsense. But even 
if it had any meaning, it could only lead us 
back into the region of satisfaction-hypotheses ; 
for here too, God requires a penitence which 
man, in the nature of the case, cannot offer. 

That this form of satisfaction-theory is less 
crude than the earlier attempts we may freely 

Ch. vi. throughout. The same attitude is taken up by W. H. 
Moberly in Essay vi. of Foundations, pp. 307, 308, where he 
states quite clearly the objections to his own view, but appears 
not to feel their force ; he brushes them aside in a short 
rhetorical passage. To both authors the thought of vicarious 
penitence seems essential ; objections to it are merely trifling 
with words. " If vicarious penitence is unmeaning and im- 
possible, the problem of atonement is insoluble" {Foundations, 
p. 308) ; " If the perfection of atoning penitence cannot be 
achieved by the personally sinless, it will become... manifest 
that it cannot be either achieved or even conceived at all" 
{Atonement and Personality, p. 117). But in truth there is no 
need for pessimism. What is really in danger is not any theory 
of atonement, but the theory of atonement by satisfaction. All 
satisfaction-theories have a common weakness ; vicarious peni- 
tence is but a more dainty variant of vicarious penalty. 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 67 

admit ; but it equally insists that God cannot 
forgive man apart from some satisfaction beyond 
man's power ; and this, I maintain, is neither 
to be found in the teaching of Jesus, nor to 
be deduced from it ; rather is it in flat contra- 
diction of both his words and his actions. 

Every explanation which is founded on 
satisfaction rendered to God by Christ, seems 
to draw a sharp distinction between the im- 
mediate aims of Christ and of God. This, to 
my mind, finds no justification in the New 
Testament. It is true that Christ is usually 
represented as the Saviour, and God as having 
sent him to perform that function. Yet God 
the Father is also represented, not once or twice 
but often, as Himself the Saviour. The phrase 
"God our Saviour" occurs no less than six 
times in the Pastoral Epistles ; St Luke uses 
the words " God my Saviour " ; in the Acts, 
St Paul is represented as speaking of " the 
Church of God, which He purchased with His 
own (Son's 1 ) blood." Here it is God who pur- 
chases, God who saves ; and this I think is the 

1 It is difficult not to accept Hort's brilliant suggestion as 
to the original text of this passage. See Westcott and Hort's 
Introduction to N.T., Appendix, p. 99. 

5—2 



68 Forgiveness and Suffering 

mature conception both of St Paul and St John. 
Such evidence is subversive of any suggestion 
that Christ in any sense purchased our salvation 
from God. The action of Christ is rather 
thought of as an expression of the Father's love, 
winning men back to Himself by the revelation 
of that which is within His heart. 

How hard it is to read the gospels without 
prejudice ! How hard to rid our minds of a 
preconceived idea ! The free forgiveness of sins 
was the vital spark of Christ's teaching. " Thy 
sins be forgiven thee." Wherever he found 
repentance, there he scattered forgiveness ; it 
was as water to the tender plant. But it was 
new doctrine, and very hard to receive ; fitting 
so pat and glove-like to the measure of mans 
need, it was surely too good to be true. And 
so this central teaching became overlaid, ob- 
scured, and contradicted ; the very acts of 
forgiveness by Christ, during his ministry, 
became interpreted as an advance-benefit of 
his own death — a purely fanciful contrivance, 
admirably invented to bolster up a common 
prejudice ; of such a thing there is no sign in 
the forgiving words of Jesus, and there could be 
no understanding in the mind of the recipient. 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 69 

The doctrine of free forgiveness permeates 
both the teaching and the practice of Jesus. 
It is a corollary of the doctrine that God is 
love. But it is constantly suppressed as in- 
compatible with God's justice ; justice, it is 
assumed, is not satisfied unless God should get 
His pound of flesh. Yet if you think of for- 
giveness simply in its personal relation, free 
forgiveness is a perfectly reasonable thing. 
When a man repents and turns away from 
his sin, he is, by that very fact, forgiveable ; 
the forgiveness of such an one is an act of 
righteousness as well as of mercy, for in re- 
spect of his fault the man is righteous ; God 
forgives the repentant, not in spite of justice, 
but because of justice. God's attitude to men 
is not that of justice tempered with mercy : 
not the resultant of a collision of two opposing 
forces : not a compromise between two contrary 
tendencies within the nature of God. Mercy 
and justice are met together, not in collision, 
but in harmony ; all the forces within the 
divine nature are operating in the same di- 
rection — that of forgiveness. To forgive the 
unrepentant is impossible ; not to forgive the 
repentant is equally so. 



70 Forgiveness and Suffering 

To some it will seem that the doctrine 
of free forgiveness is in flat contradiction of 
the thesis of my earlier pages. " There," I 
shall be told, " you made out that every evil 
act sets its indelible mark on the doer, and 
that he cannot escape the consequence ; now 
you say that as soon as he repents, he is certain 
of immediate forgiveness with God." The two 
things are complementary truths, not contra- 
dictory. An ass or an ox may fall into a pit ; 
but that does not prevent it from scrambling 
out again if it can, or being pulled out, if it 
cannot. The laws of nature are not contra- 
vened by either operation. Or take another 
example. If I sustain a severe wound, or 
fracture my arm, the knowledge that nature 
must take her course does not prevent the 
surgeon from dressing the wound or setting 
the fracture in a favourable position. Nature 
has her way in either case ; but the results 
are very different. In the one case the wound 
will suppurate and the fracture will not unite ; 
in the other the bone will knit, and the wound 
will heal, leaving only a scar to register the 
past. The surgeon has but directed the course 
of nature ; he has skilfully guided the vital 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 71 

forces to compass recovery. He has not con- 
travened nature's laws ; he has understood 
them. The constant operation of the laws of 
action and reaction gives the condition to all 
our activities, and their understanding is the 
basis of all our progress. Just as the processes 
of natural life form the constant background of 
the surgeon's activity, so the process of action 
and reaction in the spiritual sphere forms the 
background of all mutual personal activity, 
whether of man towards man, or of God to- 
wards man. So when God forgives the sinner, 
His action in no way contravenes the law that 
sin leads to spiritual death, any more than you 
interfere with the law of gravity when you pull 
your beast out of a hole. Forgiveness is the 
restoration of the sinner to the path of life, and 
is based upon the assumption that sin is the 
way of death. And this comprehensive view 
of the matter is summarised in the words : "The 
wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is 
everlasting life." The law of man's nature 
has not ceased to operate, but a new force 
has entered the scene — the force of personal 
inspiration. 

God's forgiveness then is free ; it is not 



72 Forgiveness and Suffering 

obtained by transactions, satisfactions or 
guarantees beyond our ken ; it is only con- 
ditioned by repentance ; this condition is not 
one arbitrarily imposed, but inherent in the 
proposition ; repentance alone is receptive of 
forgiveness ; acceptance is the condition of all 
giving. 

If, then, God is always ready to forgive in 
response to repentance, it would at first sight 
appear as if the only activity to be evoked is 
an activity on man's part. He has, as it were, 
only to come and drink of a fountain which is 
always flowing, to partake of a feast which is 
always prepared, to put (may we suggest it ?) 
his spiritual penny into the spiritual slot. Yet 
these metaphors are all illusory, if pressed. 
The proceeding is a personal one ; God is not 
a fountain, or a feast, or an automatic machine. 
It is precisely here that we are apt to be misled. 
One well-known author 1 has suggested that 
God's forgiveness is self-acting ; if this is so, 
then the metaphor of the automatic machine 
is not hyperbolic. The laws, by which the 
universe is ordered, are self-acting, and are 
properly called so ; but the personal relationships 

1 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, pp. 57, 58. 



Forgiveness a Personal Relation 73 

of God are not self-acting ; with God, as with 
men, forgiveness is an act of self-revelation, 
an opening of His heart to His creatures, an 
active giving. True, the more God-like the 
human father, the more certain is the prodigal 
son of forgiveness, when he comes repentant. 
But is the forgiveness therefore self-acting ? 
Verily no. Because you can always be sure 
of the generous conduct of a friend, do you call 
his generosity automatic ? Because you trust 
a man implicitly, is his faithfulness self-acting ? 
Theirs is not the dead consistency of auto- 
matism, but the living constancy of spiritual 
strength. 

The distinction is a vital one. Reconciliation 
involves giving as well as taking; it is a doubly- 
active spiritual process. Bead the story of the 
prodigal's return, and you will see. The father s 
activity dominates the picture with his im- 
pulsive love. " While he was yet a great way 
off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and 
ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him." His 
love leaps forth to meet the approaching peni- 
tent ; it is all alive ; it embraces, forgives, 
restores, protects. If the son's return is a thing 
of action, even more so is the father's welcome. 



74 Forgiveness and Suffering 

Not without a doubly-active mutual embrace 
is the work of restoration completed ; only so 
can love again become operative. 

But are the relations just as before ? Is 
the father's love the same as before the son 
went away? No; something has been added; 
the quality of the thing is different; before, it 
had the diamond's brightness : now it has a 
richer ruby glow. Before, there was love in 
the father's eye ; but now it shines through 
a tear. In that tear lies hid the mystery of 
forgiveness. 



CHAPTEE YI 

THE NEED OF SUFFERING 

I have insisted that God's forgiveness is 
free to the repentant sinner ; but I have also 
suggested that there is something in the heart 
of God in relation to that forgiveness, which 
we have not yet fathomed. I now propose to 
look for the evidence and explanation of that 
something in the life of Jesus ; to inquire how 
his life and death are related to the forgiveness 
of sins. 

Jesus certainly had a clear conception of 
his mission, and of the significance of his own 
life. His own account of it was not dependent 
on the circumstances or manner of his birth. 
His claims were to be judged on the merits of 
his life. He claimed to bring men a revelation 
of God ; to teach them the truth about God ; 
that God was their Father, that God was love. 
But more than this, and transcending this, he 



76 



Forgiveness and Suffering 



claimed himself to be a revelation of God. His 
works, his words, his thoughts, — the whole 
attitude and outlook of his life, were of the 
divine quality. He is the way to God ; he 
is the truth of God ; he is the divine life. 
When his disciples besought him to shew them 
the Father, the answer came, " He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father." So it appears 
that if we wish to know about the activities 
of the Father, we are directed to look at Jesus. 
The object of his mission, as he conceived it, 
was not to conduct transactions with the Father, 
but to reveal the Father to men. His love 
was the Father's love ; his forgiveness was the 
Fathers forgiveness... and what shall we say of 
his sufferings ? 

The meaning of this element in his life was 
clear enough to his own mind. In order to 
fulfil his revelation of the Father, he must 
needs suffer. This his disciples could not 
understand ; and his disciples of later times, 
while they have accepted the fact, have failed 
also to understand it. All sorts of reasons have 
been given why the Christ must needs suffer, 
except the true reason. 

" Father, forgive them." Why does the 



The Need of Suffering 77 

spirit of forgiveness, which radiates from the 
cross of Jesus, count for so much in the world ? 
Because it cost much. It is the cost of forgive- 
ness with which we have to do, when we face 
the problem of Atonement. 

Forgiveness which does not involve cost is 
not worth the name. Formal pardon for an 
offence which does not hurt, has no moral value. 
But the father's pardon of his returning prodi- 
gal has value, because it represents love which 
has lived through pain. Herein alone lies the 
value of pardon. The worth of forgiveness is 
measured exactly by the intensity of the suffer- 
ing inflicted by the offender. That is the cost 
of forgiveness ; and in the nature of the case, it 
is a cost borne by the injured person, and not 
by the wrongdoer. 

The point is of ultimate importance. You 
may say that the wrongdoer ought to bear the 
brunt of his own evil deed ; but the whole 
meaning of forgiveness is that he does not, and 
that the other does. It is not a substitution, 
but an infliction ; not a flimsy hypothesis, but 
a hard fact. He who forgives, has borne the 
smart inflicted without retaliating ; his love 
has lived through pain ; the plant of love, in 



78 Forgiveness and Suffering 

the garden of his heart, saved from the killing 
bite of frost, tended with care and sunned from 
heaven, has thrown a blossom of forgiveness ; 
its beauty and fragrance are for the other, 
having plucked it, to enjoy. But that flower 
does not grow wild ; it needs much labour, and 
is very costly. 

Does not this kind of costliness enter into 
divine as well as human forgiveness ? Is it not 
with such a thought that we should study the 
life of Jesus ? 

Now if we turn to the New Testament, we 
shall find in the minds of all the writers a 
conviction that there is some vital relationship 
between the sufferings of Jesus and the for- 
giveness of sins. " This is my blood, which is 
given... for the forgiveness of sins." " My blood 
which I will give for the life of the world." 
Not only do we find it in the Gospels ; it 
pervades the Apostolic teaching in the Acts ; 
it echoes through the epistles, not only of 
St Paul, but also St John, St Peter, and 
the writer to Hebrews 1 . And from that time 

1 E.g. from St Paul, " In whom we have redemption through 
his blood, even the forgiveness of sins," Eph. i. 7: St Peter, 
"Ye were redeemed by the precious blood of Christ," 1 Pet. i. 19 : 



The Need of Suffering 79 

to this, it has been a constant part of the 
Christian faith, that somehow, through the 
passion of Christ, we obtain the forgiveness 
of sins. The close relationship of these two 
ideas has been elaborated by several modern 
authors, and I think they have justified their 
contention. Too often, however, they have 
made it a foundation on which they build a 
theory of satisfaction by substitution ; and 
with such a conclusion I have no particle of 
sympathy. The matter in which I differ from 
such writers, and differ profoundly, is that with 
them the process is transactional, legal, imputa- 
tive, artificial ; for me the process is inherent 
and vital. 

Let us try to divest our minds of precon- 
ceptions, and strive to appreciate the meaning 
of Christ's passion in its historical setting. 
Jesus was wickedly put to death by wicked 
men ; he bore their sin, not in the conventional, 
supramundane sense, but really and actually ; 
not a penalty, but a direct infliction. This 
( ~ 

St John, " The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin," 
1 John i. 7 : Heb., "To put away sin by the sacrifice of himself," 
Heb. ix. 26 : Acts, "Through this man is preached unto you the 
forgiveness of sins," Acts xiii. 38. 



80 Forgiveness and Suffering 

infliction he bore to the end, and to the end 
the light of forgiving love shone from his eye. 
The process was the same as the process of all 
human forgiveness ; its value is measured by 
suffering. It is the very intensity of the suffer- 
ings of Jesus which lends supreme significance 
to the cry " Father, forgive them." That for- 
giveness was surely divine ; yet by its intensity 
only is it marked off from that which we call 
human ; for in fact the process of all forgiveness 
is the same ; and all is divine. 

Again and again we find in Christ's utter- 
ances this same trend of thought — the costliness 
of forgiveness. The sheep which has gone 
astray is recovered by the labour and at the 
cost of the shepherd ; the servant is forgiven 
his debt — at the expense of his lord. But in 
the story of the lost son we have the climax ; 
for here we have no analogy, but the real thing: 
by a divine alchemy, love has found an antidote 
for the poison ; the very reckless injury to the 
father's heart has evoked from that heart, not 
the bitterness of revenge, but the joyful welcome 
of forgiving love — joyful through tears. So we 
may find in Jesus's teaching, as well as in his life, 
that forgiveness to his mind was a thing of cost. 



The Need of Suffering 81 

Not only, however, is there, in the nature of 
things, an intimate and vital connexion between 
forgiveness and suffering, but suffering is a 
necessary antecedent of forgiveness. The two 
processes do not run, as it were, on parallel 
lines, but the one flows from the other ; for- 
giveness is sequential to suffering, and suffering 
alone can render forgiveness possible. Forgive- 
ness is the end, suffering is the means. Without 
suffering there is no forgiveness. Thus we 
arrive, by a different route, it is true, at a simi- 
lar conclusion as the New Testament author, 
when he found the same principle underlying 
both Hebrew and Christian thought, — the prin- 
ciple that " without shedding of blood there is 
no remission." It were too much to set about 
to prove that the thought of this necessary 
psychological relation of suffering to forgiveness 
lay implicit in the whole sacrificial system of 
Hebrew antiquity ; yet such an idea could not 
be condemned as preposterous 1 . The need for 
divine forgiveness and the longing to participate 
in the divine life are fundamental to religious 
thought in all ages ; the slain lamb represented 

1 It seems consistent with the facts advanced by Kobertson- 
Smith, Religion of the Semites. See specially Lect. viil, pp. 287 ff. 

D. w. 6 



82 Forgiveness and Suffering 

to the mind of the Semites the divine life of 
which they were to partake. But whether or 
no we regard the ancient ritual of sacrifice as 
founded on a true spiritual instinct, yet it is 
clear that Christ and his disciples took these 
dry bones of sacrificial ritual, clothed them in 
flesh and blood, and breathed into them a new 
and throbbing vitality. 

The necessity of suffering as antecedent to 
forgiveness — the Set Tradeiv — this is the domin- 
ant note of Christ's ministry ; it underlies the 
whole tragic history ; it forms the constant 
recurring theme, and harmonises at every point 
with his words and works. He who would 
forgive must needs suffer. 

In this, if in aught else, Christ was the 
revelation of God. He was doing the things 
which he saw the Father doing : in him the 
Father stood revealed. Is the Son afflicted by 
the wickedness of men ? So is the Father. 
Does the Son suffer by reason of sin ? So does 
the Father. Does the Son suffer lovingly, 
willingly, always in the spirit of forgiveness, 
made perfect through suffering ? So does the 
Father. It is no new doctrine, that the Son, 
in suffering, declares the Father to us ; his 



The Need of Suffering 83 

life and death alike were the exhibition of 
God's love for the human race. The lesson of 
the cross is the lesson that God loves the 
world. Why, it is the message of the Gospel. 
There is no other. 

When love comes in contact with moral 
evil, when the loving God comes into touch 
with the sinner, then if that love is to result 
in reconciliation and forgiveness, suffering must 
be the means and method. It is certainly true 
in men ; Jesus came to tell us that it is true 
in God. 

Can Almighty God suffer? Is not God 
impassible ? If God is passible, if He can 
suffer, does not this bring Him down from His 
supreme pedestal of omnipotence, of unchange- 
ableness, of eternal bliss ? The answer is short : 
God is love. We must take God down off any 
pedestal on which love cannot stand. Such 
pedestals are of our own making. That God 
is a God of power and order and knowledge — 
this is true. But in relation to his spiritually- 
conscious creatures, all this is of minor import- 
ance ; to us the crucial point is that He is love. 
Now love is passible ; and if God is love, God 
is passible. A person who can love, and yet 

6—2 



84 Forgiveness and Suffering 

cannot suffer, is unimaginable ; and if God is 
such, He is unthinkable ; for we cannot think 
of a love that is out of range of suffering. Love 
and suffering dwell in one house. Nay, they 
are twin sisters ; they live and grow together ; 
hardly are they known apart, but that the 
dress of one is of a more sombre hue. If the 
love be great, great also is the power of suffer- 
ing ; and if God's love be infinite, then He 
can suffer infinitely too. The doctrine of the 
impassibility of God, taken in its wide sense, 
is the greatest heresy that ever smirched 
Christianity ; it is not only false, it is the 
antipodes of truth. It is the negation of 
Christ's message. By this door has entered 
false thought and false conception of every 
kind. That God Almighty can and does suffer 
in relation to His sinful creatures, — this is a 
cardinal doctrine of Christianity. 

Do you think such love the negation of 
omnipotence ? I answer boldly, No. A door 
of steel you may break with force ; the door 
of man's heart cannot be forced ; it has to be 
opened from the inside ; against the will of 
free- willed man, force is no remedy ; love is the 
only omnipotence. 



The Need of Suffering 85 

But again you say, God is unchangeable. 
Yes, He is unchangeable ; but His is not the 
unchangeableness of a stone. Of a true friend 
we say, He never changes. We do not mean 
that his expression does not change, or that he 
is always doing the same thing, still less that 
he never does anything at all. It is his will 
and purpose of friendliness which does not 
change. God's is not the inactive unchange- 
ableness of a lifeless thing ; His is the active 
changelessness of a living spirit ; changelessness 
of will and purpose ; and those are the will and 
purpose of love. The changelessness of God 
stands in contrast to the changefulness of man. 
Man's imperfect knowledge, the imperfect pro- 
cesses of his thought, drive him to change his 
mind, to retrace his footsteps, to alter his direc- 
tion ; he wastes his activities and misdirects 
his energies ; God is constant in His purpose, 
uniform in His direction, unswerving in His 
will. In this sense God is changeless, and 
this is all the changelessness we need postulate 
of Him. Whatever of change is inseparable 
from life, action, and fulfilment of purpose, 
such change is not incompatible with Godhead. 

Thus we find that passibility in God, 



86 Forgiveness and Suffering 

involving as it does love and suffering, need 
not be regarded as a contradiction of that power 
and stability which are necessary attributes of 
the divine. For love alone assures constancy 
of purpose, and love alone can carry the citadel 
of an estranged heart. 

But before love can win, it must be per- 
ceived by its object ; before forgiveness can 
become operative with man, it must be made 
manifest to his mind. And this, I take it, 
was the object and mission of Jesus ; to shew 
to* man, projected, as it were, on to the screen 
of human life, the hidden life of God ; to unveil 
to man's inward eye the face of God ; to prove 
to man that God's heart is a wounded heart, 
yet a perfectly forgiving heart, because a heart 
of inextinguishable love. 

That God loves us ; that He is wounded by 
our wrong-doing ; that these wounds cause Him 
suffering ; that only by and through the ordeal 
of suffering can His heart produce for us the 
gift of forgiveness ; this is what Christ came to 
teach. And this, however it has been obscured 
by defective explanation, — this, I say, has been 
the fundamental instinct which has drawn men's 
hearts up to God ; the belief that on the cross 



The Need of Suffering 87 

is seen a living picture of the love of God ; that 
God is revealed in terms of the Christ ; that 
" God is reigning from the tree." 

I observe, however, that certain writers fight 
shy of pressing this doctrine of the passibility 
of God to its proper conclusion, on the ground 
that it savours of the heresy of Patripassianism 1 . 
The objection is based on a misunderstanding 
of what that heresy was. The Patripassians 
denied a personal distinction betwee^the Son 
and the Father ; Noetus, their leader, taught 
that " the Father himself endured birth, suffer- 
ing and death in the flesh." It was one of the 
phases of the Christological controversy, and 
really has no bearing on our present discussion. 
I do not, of course, for a moment suggest that 
God the Father suffered death here on the 
cross : I do maintain that as Jesus suffered on 
earth from man's sin, so God the Father suffers 
always in heaven. The distinction is so obvious, 
that I need not labour the matter further. 

Indeed, I am not aware that the Christian 
church of any age has ever denied that God 
Almighty suffers in relation to sin. Such im- 
passibility as has been formally recognized has 

1 E.g. Stevens, Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 218. 



88 Forgiveness and Suffering 

never gone further than a denial that God is 
subject to passions which might affect the 
justice of His actions and His orderly conduct 
of the universe ; in this sense divine impas- 
sibility is generally admitted. The kind of 
passibility which results from the impact of sin 
on the heart of a loving God — this is of a 
different character. 

While, however, the latter kind of passi- 
bility has never formally been denied, it must 
be admitted that it has not, until recent years, 
met with much encouragement. To fathers, 
schoolmen and reformers alike, it seemed a 
sort of impiety to attribute to God Almighty 
even the potentiality of pain or suffering. Even 
Anselm, perceiving the damage which God 
sustains from sin, expresses it in terms of 
violated honour — a cold, impersonal sensitive- 
ness, — rather than the warm personal distress 
of a wounded heart. Such a passibility as this 
was probably beyond the range of the early 
or mediaeval theologians ; it was not demanded 
by their theories, and they failed to see in it 
a necessary corollary to the Christian faith. 
To theologians of to-day it makes a stronger 
appeal. To-day it is felt that if we accept as 



The Need of Suffering 89 

truth the transcendent personality of God — 
and the Christian faith demands it — then we 
cannot stop short of investing that personality 
with such attributes as seem to us inseparable 
from the ideal personal life. A personal God 
who cannot love tenderly, nor suffer in relation 
to that love, though better than an abstraction, 
is little better than a statue ; when pricked 
it does not bleed; when pleased it does not 
smile ; an outstretched hand it does not grasp. 
We do not want a monarch in his robes of 
state, but a king whose home is in his people's 
heart, and theirs in his. If we are to invest 
God with personality at all, it must be alive 
and warm ; if it can love, it must needs be 
capable also of suffering. 

So deeply is this felt to-day that it is 
hardly possible to take up any modern book 
on the subject where it does not find some 
expression 1 . 

Fifty years ago it found early vent in the 
work of Horace Bushnell : " There is a cross in 

1 Examples may be found in Stevens's Christian Doctrine of 
Salvation, pp. 391, 436, 481, Oxenhanr's Catholic Doctrine of 
Atonement, p. 341, W. Temple's Faith and Modern Thought, 
p. 135, Hinton's Mystery of Pain, p. 40, McDowalPs Evolution 
and the Need of Atonement, pp. 148, 153. 



90 Forgiveness and Suffering 

God," he says, " before the wood is seen upon 
Calvary, hid in God's own virtue itself 1 ." 
" This is the eternal story of which Christ 
shows us but a single leaf 1 ." And to-day in 
Foundations we find quoted with approval an 
echo of the same thought : " There was a cross 
in the heart of God before there was one 
planted on the green hill outside of Jerusalem. 
And now that the cross of wood has been 
taken down, the one in the heart of God 
abides, and it will remain so long as there is 
one sinful soul for whom to suffer 2 ." This is 
a mode of thought which needs no apology. 
What is it but a rediscovery in our day of the 
picture of " the lamb slain before the foundation 
of the world " (Rev. xiii. 8), and of that vision 
of the heavenly throne, in whose centre is seen, 

1 Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), p. 73 ; Forgiveness and 
Law (1874), p. 60. "The latter book I have read since this study 
was mainly finished. The first chapter is a remarkable contri- 
bution, specially in view of its date (1874) ; I find in that chapter 
(not in the rest of the book) numerous and important points of 
contact with my own point of view ; more so, I think, than in 
any other single work. He does not entirely get away from the 
satisfaction theories, but they are only retained as satisfactions 
elaborated within the mind of God, and not as supplied ab extra. 

2 Foundations, p. 322, quoted from Dinsmore, Atonement in 
Literature and Life. 



The Need of Suffering 91 

not the trappings of royalty, but a wounded 
heart. (Rev. v. 6). I am persuaded that this 
represents a true and most fruitful tendency 
of modern thought. At first sight indeed 
there is a seeming incompatibility between 
almightiness and suffering, between God and 
pain, between supremacy and self-sacrifice ; but 
when we come to close quarters with that diffi- 
culty it does not really constitute a philosophic 
impasse. 

Pain, indeed, simply inflicted from without, 
and answering to nothing within the being of 
the sufferer, does certainly suggest weakness 
and involuntary limitation. We could not, for 
instance, think of God as suffering from the 
tooth -ache ; but when the submission to pain 
is voluntary, with motive and object defined, 
then suffering acquires a dignity, for it lies on 
the road to achievement. On the one hand is 
limitation, on the other self-limitation. 

Now any act on the part of God, even a 
creative act, involves Him in some sort of self- 
limitation. The doctrine of the kenosis — the 
self-emptying of God — is not a mere invention 
of Christian dogmatists, but a necessity of 
philosophic thought. Any act of self-expression 



92 Forgiveness and Suffering 

involves a corresponding self-limitation. God 
may have an infinite potentiality of self-expres- 
sion ; but having determined its direction, He 
is limited to travel along the line of His own 
choice. If He chooses the expansion of love, He 
thereby chooses the limitation of self-sacrifice, 
and even of suffering. He is not driven to 
it ; He chooses it : it is no derogation to His 
infinitude. 

The late James Hinton, in his illuminating 
little book, The Mystery of Pain, points out 
that even in our human sphere, self-sacrifice on 
behalf of someone we love, need not be felt as 
pain. " Love when it is strong," he says, " can 

banish pain We are not only willing, we 

rejoice, to bear an ordinarily painful thing for 
the benefit or pleasure of one whom we in- 
tensely love" [Mystery of Pain, pp. 34, 35 ff.).,A 
Under such circumstances it is not felt as pain. 
The pain is latent if present at all ; it does 
not rise to the surface of consciousness ; it is 
insulated from our perception by the love which 
involves it. So, perhaps, in the perfection of 
God's love, there is no pain, but only joy, in 
His self-sacrifice. 

Such a consideration is most helpful ; but 



The Need of Suffering 93 

it does not carry us the whole way. The 
author himself feels (pp. 79, 80, 96, 97) that 
it is not an adequate account of the suffering 
inflicted on God by man's sin ; the pain of 
contact with moral evil cannot thus be elimi- 
nated or made as if it were not ; in face of sin, 
His holiness and love must bring about not 
a mitigation but an aggravation of suffering. 
" Was there ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" 
Such distress could only be met in the strength 
of a great hope and a steadfast purpose ; such 
pain could only be willingly borne in the certain 
confidence of the ultimate triumph of forgiving 
love. If the perfections of God make His 
self-sacrifice a joy, they also intensify His dis- 
tress at the touch of unrighteousness. And 
each of these truths within the divine being is 
seen reflected in the historical crucifixion. 

For God and for man alike the way of 
forgiveness must be the way of the Cross. But, 
in maintaining this as a fundamental truth, I 
do not wish to suggest that the act of forgive- 
ness is in itself a painful thing to the soul that 
forgives. On the contrary, it is, or it ought to 
be, a joyful and happy function. But the power 
to perform that function is only attained at the 



94 Forgiveness and Suffering 

cost of suffering. The act of forgiveness is an 
act of happy reunion ; so happy as to blot out 
the painful memory of its costliness. But this 
makes its costliness none the less real ; every 
soul that forgives has passed through its hour 
of distress. 

Jesus, then, upon the cross, is to us the 
glory and the power of God ; for there he is 
a picture of the action, the suffering and the 
love of the Father whom he came to reveal. 
This is no heresy, but fundamental Christianity. 
Forgiveness is the crown of love ; so the love of 
Jesus had to be made perfect through suffering ; 
for without suffering there is no forgiveness. 
And in all this Jesus revealed God. He was 
showing us God's nature, property, character. 
As Christ was to those who wronged him, such 
is God to us ; as Jesus suffered from the wicked- 
ness of men, so God suffers too ; as Jesus had 
to suffer in order that he might forgive, so can 
God's forgiveness proceed only out of a wounded 
heart ; and as Christ was made perfect through 
suffering, so we may truly say that God's love, 
passing through suffering to forgiveness, seeks 
its proper crown, and works out its own inherent 
perfection. 



CHAPTER VII 

FORGIVENESS VITAL NOT FORMAL 

I have attempted to sketch in the last 
chapter an explanation of why the Christ must 
needs suffer. That explanation is rooted in the 
facts of human psychology, and is based on the 
actual process of human forgiveness. Now if 
this is to be our confession of faith, what be- 
comes of the current controversies over this 
subject? It seems to me that those contro- 
versies disappear one by one ; the point of view 
is altered ; the distortions, which result from 
our visual medium, have vanished. What, for 
instance, becomes of the transactional theories ? 
those processes which have been supposed to 
go on between the Father and the Son, those 
arrangements, agreements, compromises, plans? 
how the Son propitiated and appeased the 
Father, how Jesus's holiness, submission and 
suffering brought satisfaction to the offended 



96 Forgiveness and Suffering 

righteousness, justice and majesty of his 
God ? Why, it all seems to me to vanish 
like a mist. Jesus forgave because Jesus suf- 
fered, and the Father forgives because the 
Father suffers. Neither would suffer if He 
did not love. God does not forgive because 
another suffers ; God must needs suffer Himself 
if He is to forgive. There is no transaction ; 
forgiveness is free to the repentant ; its cost 
has been paid by the heart that forgives. 

From this point of view, also, I think, we 
shall find that we have lost sight of those 
controversies which concern the subjective and 
objective relations of the atonement. This 
atonement was supposed to consist of two 
parts : first, the effect which the suffering of 
Jesus has on the minds of men ; secondly, the 
effect which it had on the mind of God. This 
suggests that Christ's function as mediator is 
that of a third person, inducing two belligerents 
to come to terms under which neither party's 
honour suffers. But this is surely a travesty 
of Christianity ; not in this sense is Jesus a 
mediator. He mediated by bringing down 
God's love to the range of human ken, and 
drawing men up into intelligent contact with 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 97 

it. Such mediation was needful to bring God's 
love within men's reach, and to make it opera- 
tive towards them; but the mediator did not 
create the love, he only revealed it. He was 
himself an expression of it, and no third party. 
Did Christ's death, then, produce no effect 
whatever on God ? Had it no objective effect 
in producing a different attitude in God to- 
wards us, as it admittedly awakens in us a 
different attitude towards God ? I answer, 
Absolutely none. God's attitude towards sin- 
ful men was revealed by Jesus ; but it was 
not altered by anything which Jesus did or 
could do. It is always the same ; it always 
has been ; it always will be. God does not 
change. 

But, I shall be told, surely Christ did some- 
thing on the Cross. Was there not a work 
which he finished there ? What did he mean 
when he said, "It is finished " ? The answer 
is simple and perfectly clear. The work which 
he finished was to reveal the Father to men. 
It was to shew to mankind in his life, suffer- 
ings and death, the nature and character of 
God ; to draw men to himself and through him- 
self to God. 

d. w. 7 



98 Forgiveness and Suffering 

This conception of Christ's work is certainly 
that which is taken in the fourth gospel, from 
which the thought of a finished work is de- 
rived. In ch. xvii. (the prayer, we might call it, 
of filial unity) we find the sequence of thought : 
"I have glorified Thee... I have finished the 
work which Thou gavest me to do... I have 
manifested Thy name to the men whom Thou 
gavest me... they know that all things what- 
soever Thou hast given me are from Thee." 
St John has no idea of any satisfaction or 
expiation rendered to God ; to his mind the 
finished work of Jesus was the completed mani- 
festation of the Father. And that is conceived 
of as a work accomplished by his whole life, 
and finished only when that life was yielded up 
on the cross. Therefore, at least in respect of 
the "finished work" of Jesus, the fourth gospel 
seems pointedly to support my contention. 
I will even go further than this, and say that 
the whole conception of thought in the fourth 
gospel is one which fits well and closely with 
the synthesis of doctrine which I here seek to 
build up. 

And while I claim that such a conception is 
in close accord with the religious philosophy of 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 99 

the fourth gospel, I do not feel that it clashes 
with the views of the author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, or with (at least) the later epistles 
of St Paul. I do not pretend that it is derived 
from any of these, but only that it does not 
come into collision with them. That it can 
hardly be squared with many of the expressions 
in the earlier epistles of St Paul, we may frankly 
admit. The earlier epistles — so dear to the old 
school of theology — represent St Paul's mind 
still struggling toward a Christian develope- 
ment, not yet wholly freed from the trammels 
and moulds of his traditional Rabbinic thought ; 
the later epistles, such as that to Ephesus, show 
us the matured mind, expressed in metaphors 
less startling indeed, but more illuminating, 
antitheses less abrupt but more profound. To 
learn a man, we must learn what he developed 
into, not only what he developed from. 

And if the views here expressed find them- 
selves in general harmony with the thought of 
the great Christian writers, they are in still 
better accord with what we know of the ex- 
pressed thought of Jesus. I have already 
suggested instances of this, and beyond such 
examples I am content to leave the matter to 

7—2 



100 Forgiveness and Suffering 

the reader's judgement. Two instances — and 
only two, I think — can be adduced as out of 
harmony with such a view, and as favouring the 
earlier conception. 

The first of these is, " The son of man came 
. . .to give his life a ransom for many." A ransom 
(KvTpov), it is said, must be paid to somebody. 
The earlier or patristic theology said that it 
was paid to the devil ; the later mediaeval and 
earlier protestant divines claimed that it was 
paid to God. Each of these conclusions in 
turn had to sit on the back of an overworked 
metaphor ; for the cost of redemption needs not 
to be paid to anyone. The forgiving, suffering 
love of a wife may redeem her husband, or the 
husband's his wife ; the cost of reclaiming the 
one falls on the other ; yet who shall say to 
whom the price is paid ? Every noble action is 
a thing of cost ; but by " cost " we only mean 
the expenditure of spiritual energy towards a 
noble purpose. And the cost of our forgiveness 
is that suffering within the heart of God, which 
alone made it possible. 

The second instance is the cry, " My God, 
My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" I think 
no passage in literature has been so distorted 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 101 

from its true meaning. It is the supreme in- 
stance of the eternal " Why ? " of innocent 
suffering. Its very existence is proof that the 
heart still trusts in God, though it cannot see 
the way. It is the cry of high faith calling out 
of the thick darkness. It is the fearful ordeal 
of the soul, wherein men are invited to doubt 
not only the love, but the very existence of God. 
But in the case of Jesus, the triumphant issue 
was never for a moment in doubt. 

The thing is of such high import that it 
must be touched on more fully. In quoting the 
psalm (xxii.) Jesus presumably meant what the 
psalmist meant. Now it is abundantly clear 
that the psalmist did not mean that God had 
in fact deserted or forsaken the sufferer. The 
sense is defined in the second clause, " Why art 
thou so far from helping me ? " forcing us to 
interpret the first : " Why has God left me to 
suffer thus ? Why does He not intervene ? " But 
such a sense of the Father's non-intervention, 
combined with a feeling of utter loneliness — 
desolation, if you like — this is a different thing 
entirely from a loss of trust, confidence and 
love. It has nothing to do with a sense of 
spiritual separation, much less with a sense of 



102 Forgiveness and Suffering 

the Father's wrath. It has its counterpart in 
the feelings of a son in affliction and distress, 
away from the protection of his father's arm ; 
lonely indeed, yet never for a moment doubting 
the father's love, compassion, and sympathy. 
Later in the psalm we read : " He hath not 
despised nor abhorred the affliction of the 
afflicted, neither hath he hid his face from 
him ; but when he cried unto him he heard." 
Precisely ; it was the cry of faith groping 
in darkness, soon to emerge into the light 
of joyful understanding. 

Such is the view rightly taken by McLeod 
Campbell, Stevens, and other writers 1 . Not so 
Dr Moberly, who finds its psychology and 
exegesis alike defective. "It is assumed," he 
says, " that the meaning of the words as used 
by the psalmist is a measure of their meaning 
in the supreme moment of the sacrifice of the 
Crucified 2 ." But what other exegetical basis 
than this can we have, unless it be a basis of 
theological preconception % What other clue 
to Christ's meaning have w T e but the meaning 

1 Bushnell is of the same view ; Forgiveness and Law, pp. 161, 
162. 

2 R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 408. 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 103 

of the psalm ? Dr Campbell claims for Jesus 
an unbroken trust in God, even in the hour of 
his darkest extremity ; Moberly rejects this 
claim ; and in his view, if I read him aright, 
we are left to suppose that the trust of Jesus 
in God did break down at the crisis ; and this 
for the very good reason that God had at that 
crisis turned his face away and (for the time 
being) had forfeited all claim to trust, con- 
fidence and love. That is not a pleasant picture 
to contemplate ; it is every bit as repellent as 
the extremest doctrine of Calvinism, which the 
same author energetically repudiates. The con- 
ception, in short, which is generally known as 
the " Dereliction " on the cross, is a pure myth. 
A real separation, even for a moment — not to 
speak of separation in anger — between Jesus 
and his God (if we regard him as human), or 
between Son and Father (if we regard him as 
divine) is as revolting to our spiritual instinct 
as it is to our theology ; it depends upon a 
distortion of words which in their own context 
have a plain and natural significance. It nega- 
tives the note of perfect harmony with God 
which forms the key-note of the life of Jesus ; 
at its beginning, " This is my beloved son, in 



104 Forgiveness and Suffering 

whom I am well-pleased " ; in the middle, " He 
that sent me is with me ; he hath not left me 
alone ; for I do always the things that please 
him " ; and at the end, " Ye shall all... leave me 
alone ; and yet I am not alone because the 
Father is with me " ; and again, " Therefore 
doth my Father love me because I lay down 
my life." Thus all considerations combine to 
forbid us to build on Psalm xxii. any edifice 
whatever of satisfaction or expiation paid by 
Jesus to God. The cry from the cross, while 
it transcended in degree, yet was the same in 
kind as the cry which is ever wrung from 
the heart of mankind in the extremity of 
suffering. 

The explanation of the sufferings of Christ 
which I here attempt to bring forward is utterly 
different from any scheme of satisfaction rendered 
to God, whether by vicarious penalty or by 
vicarious penitence. My starting-point is that 
forgiveness involves suffering in the nature of 
the case — suffering which falls, not on him who 
is forgiven, but on him who forgives. Thus 
only can we find an interpretation which does 
not clash with the instincts both of reason and 
religion. 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 105 

I fear that the course of the argument has 
led me into a large amount of negative criticism ; 
but I trust it has not been unfruitful of positive 
conclusion. Let me now pick up the threads 
of thought which have emerged in the fore- 
going chapters, and attempt to focus the mental 
picture, 

God, our creator and preserver, has placed 
us in a world where certain laws of cause and 
effect have universal validity, and where our 
every action has its necessary result, not only 
on our surroundings, but on ourselves. Our 
physical developement, and equally our moral 
developement, is the outcome of our actions 
and habits in each particular sphere ; we de- 
teriorate or improve according to fixed and self- 
acting laws; and in each case we are gifted 
with an instinct of self-preservation. Through 
our moral nature, thus conditioned and regu- 
lated, we have spiritual affinities, and a capacity 
of contact with the divine. God himself, being 
a spirit of love and holiness, while He loves 
everything He has made, yet is supremely 
sensitive to wrong-doing in His creatures. 
Therefore every evil action of men is not only, 
in the nature of the case, to their own detriment, 



106 Forgiveness and Suffering 

but also is, as it were, a javelin aimed at the 
heart of God. Each wicked deed is not to be 
regarded as an affront to God, in consequence 
of which God, so to speak, turns away and 
sulks until He obtains satisfaction ; it is rather 
a stroke aimed at the heart of God, which gets 
home every time. He is a suffering God because 
a loving God. Through suffering love alone 
comes the possibility of forgiveness. And this 
is true from all time : it is in the nature of 
God. It was not brought about by the advent 
of Jesus; Jesus was the expression of a love 
which, like all love, could not remain in willing 
silence ; his life and his death were its con- 
tinuous impersonation, showing the love which 
suffered and forgave : the love which (in a 
literal sense) bare the sin of many, and made 
intercession for the transgressors. And with 
the interceding words, " Father, forgive them," 
the forgiving spirit of Jesus fared back to the 
heart of God where it had been cradled. 

The suffering of Jesus represented, not what 
man ought to suffer in expiation of his sin, but 
what God does suffer as a direct result of it, 
and having suffered is ready to forgive. This 
gives its sublime value to the forgiveness, which 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 107 

is expressed in the term ''precious blood." In 
the suffering forgiveness of Jesus we see por- 
trayed the suffering forgiveness of God. 

Though God's attitude toward wrongdoing 
in men has always been the same, yet it was an 
attitude which had to be made apparent to men's 
thought. 

The conception of God's fatherhood was not, 
indeed, totally new ; yet it was supremely 
necessary to bring it home to men's minds, not 
as a theoretic analogy, but as a psychological 
reality. The true filial attitude can only be 
evoked by the perceived actuality of a Father's 
love. To this end some form of self-expression 
was required, which should exhibit God's love 
passing through suffering to forgiveness ; and 
this could hardly be exhibited except by means 
of a perfect human life ; for thus alone could 
love, suffering and forgiveness be shown in 
their true sequential relations. It has been 
already pointed out that suffering is a necessary 
antecedent to forgiveness ; that without suffer- 
ing true forgiveness cannot exist. But it is 
also true that love is the necessary antecedent 
of such suffering ; for a certain kind of suffering 
— and that the deepest — is only made possible 



108 Forgiveness and Suffering 

by lov e. Not all suffering is of this kind ; 
I only speak of such suffering as is felt to have 
its roots in personal relationship ; the intensity 
of such suffering must vary with the intimacy 
of the personal bond. If a stranger injures 
you, you may suffer physically or financially ; 
but if your friend injures you, there is a some- 
thing added which strikes deeper and nearer 
your heart ; if it be your son who has wronged 
you, this deeper, more spiritual element in the 
suffering looms larger, and quite over-shadows 
the physical or financial damage. Because, and 
in proportion as, love enters in, you are liable 
to this spiritual suffering ; it is rooted in and 
grows out of the love which precedes it. As 
with us, so is it with God. Only because God 
loves us does He come at all within the reach 
of our injurious weapons ; His love seeks re- 
quital, and coming within our contact takes the 
risk of rebuff. Because He loves us, therefore 
we can injure Him ; because He loves and is 
injured, therefore He can forgive ; the forgive- 
ness is the compounded product of love and 
suffering — not only their product but their 
measure too. 

By this line of reasoning it becomes clear 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 109 

that suffering on the part of God, and therefore 
of Christ His revealer, is a necessary antecedent 
of divine forgiveness. But that necessity is 
derived from the nature of the case, and so 
far from needing any forensic or legal explana- 
tion, is totally inconsistent with it. 

A vital religion cannot be cooped up in the 
cage of formal and outworn definition. The 
two sets of ideas, the formal and the vital, 
cannot live together ; they are mutually ex- 
clusive. The older view, that of substitution, 
expiation, satisfaction, postulates a "give and 
take " in some form or other, between Jesus 
and God ; these two are driving a bargain ; 
mutually satisfactory, it may be, but still a 
bargain ; they are looking at the thing from 
opposite points of view ; the two persons of the 
Godhead are facing each other, reacting on each 
other, instead of both together facing and re- 
acting on the wills of their erring creatures. 
The newer view which I have tried to lay 
before you, gives no action and reaction be- 
tween Jesus and God, no bargain struck, no 
different point of view. The older hypotheses 
bristle with difficulties, moral and intellectual, 
which have made belief in them impossible to 



~") 



110 Forgiveness and Suffering 

thoughtful men ; the newer view, if once we can 
believe in a passible God, is moral, spiritual, 
self-consistent. 

The older conception is shattered on the 
rocks of thought. The questionings which it 
arouses are unanswerable. If God only forgives 
where the due expiation, already paid for sin, 
demands it, where do love and mercy come in ? 
If God is holy, how can He permit a system of 
vicarious penalty, which is, in our own sense of 
justice, both immoral and unjust ? If God's 
justice were (prior to the death of Christ) a 
bar to the exercise of His love, how should He 
send His Son at all ? Did Jesus first proclaim 
God's pardoning love, and then purchase it ? 
In this way, any theory of the atonement, in 
which Jesus expiates man's sin, drives us to 
postulate within the divine nature divergence 
and opposition, if not antagonism and contra- 
diction. It is an edifice of the imagination 
which falls by its own weight. 

The newer conception is entirely free from 
these antinomies ; it is based, not on hypo- 
thetical transactions of a supramundane sort, 
but upon that which is best and truest in human 
nature, coupled with a faith that those things 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 111 

which we know as best within ourselves have 
their counterpart — nay, their archetype — in 
God. This view demands, indeed, the belief 
that God can suffer ; that He is passible ; that 
He is affected by human action ; that He can 
rejoice ; that He can sorrow ; that He can love. 
But this is the message of the Gospel — that 
God does love the world ; and, loving, He must 
do and suffer all the rest. For us, who thus 
believe, Jesus is the representation and mani- 
festation of God ; in him we see the loving, 
the suffering, the forgiving, the rejoicing God ; 
and with eyes resting on the crucifix, we lift 
our hearts to the God of self-expressive love. 
The parable of the lost son gives us the key 
to the whole matter ; it tells of a God who 
loves, suffers, forgives, and welcomes back to 
love. To believe in a personal God who loves, 
this is Christianity ; to believe that God freely 
forgives the repentant and returning son, and 
that too at vast cost to Himself, this is 
Christianity as I conceive it ; it is the burden 
of Christ's message ; it is his living interpreta- 
tion of God. The image which Jesus wished us 
always to have in our hands and before our eyes 
— the broken body, the shed blood — these are 



112 Forgiveness and Suffering 

to bring repeatedly to our minds that God's 
forgiveness is a thing of cost. 

The costliness is exemplified and brought 
home to us by the sufferings of Christ. In them, 
as in his whole life, we see, projected into the 
sphere of time, the eternal operations of the 
divine mind. They represent to us, not, as 
Grotius would have it, an armed demonstration 
to men of the Rights of God, but an unarmed, 
unresisting — albeit resistless — demonstration of 
the Love of God. The sufferings of Christ 
were directly due to the wrongdoing of the 
men of his own time, not of ours or of any 
subsequent age ; yet to his disciples, both of 
his own and other ages, Jesus has revealed, 
once for all, the forgiving love of God. In this 
sense, the forgiving love of Jesus on the 
cross, though directed then towards those who 
wronged him, is still the medium through which 
God's forgiveness reaches men now ; only by 
means of what Jesus did then upon earth, do 
we perceive what God is doing continually in 
heaven. To some this may seem a difficult, 
mystical, even misty conception ; but it is, after 
all, only a statement in general terms of that 
which is true to everyday experience. Why 



? 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 113 

does the picture of Jesus on the cross appeal to 
the conscience of mankind ? Not because they 
feel that their evil deeds have any definite 
causal relation to the crucifixion in history, but 
because in the Crucified they see the eternal 
relation of God to sin ; not because they are 
beholding a transaction made in the distant past 
for their benefit, but because in those sufferings 
they catch the reflected light of an eternal 
truth. " God is reigning from the tree " — not 
two thousand years ago, in a distant part of 
the earth, but now and here. The love of God 
is timeless ; Jesus brought it into time, and 
wrought its golden thread into the history of 
human thought. 

It has been the purpose of this study to 
suggest a philosophy of divine forgiveness, and 
no more. The reader will readily grasp that 
the matter does not stop here ; forgiveness is 
not only the end of alienation, but the beginning 
of cooperation. When there occurs between 
any two persons an act of forgiveness, there is 
infused into the person forgiven something of 
the spirit of the other. A new spirit, a new 
influence has with the forgiveness entered his 
life ; the sense of forgiveness brings also a 

d. w. 8 



114 Forgiveness and Suffering 

sense of union and active sympathy, which 
must issue in newness of life. This also is a 
psychological affair ; it is not a thing of logic, 
or duty, or gratitude ; it is not, "You are for- 
given, you must lead a better life" ; it is a 
sequence of nature ; it is the gentle touch of 
God, thrilling a new spirit into life. 

Forgiveness is the beginning — the oft re- 
peated beginning — of the spiritual life. It is 
the getting on to the road, not the end of the 
journey. I said just now that the emblems of 
the Communion were designed to keep before 
our minds the cost of forgiveness. But that 
was not all. When Jesus was asked, " How 
can this man give us his flesh to eat ? " his 
answer was, "It is spirit that quickens ; flesh 
profits nothing. The words that I use (flesh 
and blood) mean spirit and life." It is the 
spirit and life of Jesus that every Christian 
must absorb and assimilate. God's love is the 
sun which gives us life ; forgiveness is the first 
sense of warmth that steals over us when we 
come out into the sunshine. Forgiveness and 
life are not separate things ; they are all of a 
piece. Forgiveness is the introduction to that 
union with the Divine in which salvation 



Forgiveness Vital not Formal 115 

consists ; the cost of salvation is the cost of 
forgiveness. 

Again, in this essay I have only sought to 
show in what sense the life and death of Jesus 
is to be regarded as a sacrifice for sin ; I do not 
forget that it is also an ensample to us of godly 
life. This is, indeed, only another aspect of 
the same thing ; for if, in the drama of his 
costly forgiveness, Jesus exhibited to us the 
mind, the nature and the love of God, it was 
in order that that mind should also be in us, 
that love should possess us, that nature should 
become ours. Exactly in proportion as we 
perceive the life of Jesus to be the revelation 
of God, just so can the example of Jesus be a 
moving force in our lives. To him we are 
debtors, not only for the revelation of Gods life, 
but for the continuous inspiration of our own. 

Lastly — and this is merely a tentative 
suggestion — it may be that as Jesus was the 
revealer, on the one side, of God to man, so 
on the other he was, in a sense, the revealer of 
men to God ; not, indeed (which were absurd), 
by adding anything to the knowledge of God, 
but by penetrating, as man, more completely 
into the depth of God's personal cognition. 

8—2 



116 Forgiveness and Suffering 

Perhaps this is the true meaning of " taking 
of the manhood into God," and might help us 
towards a better understanding of those figures 
of " priesthood " and " intercession " which have 
played so considerable a part in Christian litera- 
ture. 

Whatever be the destiny of future thought, 
we have at least reached the end of hypotheses 
of Atonement by Satisfaction, and we may find 
a new contentment — possibly even a complete 
solution of the problem — in Atonement by Self- 
Revelation. 

There I must leave it. The vista opened up 
to our thought is a large one, full of variety 
and colour ; its exploration I must leave to the 
reader. My object has been to lay before your 
minds, as clearly as may be, what appears to 
mine to be the principle of forgiveness both in 
God and man ; how it implies and is based on 
suffering ; and how suffering, such as God can 
undergo, is rooted in love. Only by the path of 
suffering can love win through to forgiveness. It 
behoved the Christ to suffer, because he had to 
manifest God to men ; because he had to reveal 
to man the way in which God has to forgive — 
the only way. 



CHAPTER VIII 

REFLECTIONS AND HOPES 

I do not conceal from myself that the method 
by which I have interpreted the sufferings of 
Christ differs widely from the methods in 
common use. To this initial handicap is added 
the difficulty which has been felt in stating my 
case. For, while I have attempted to shape it 
in the form of an argument, yet it has not pre- 
sented itself to my mind in terms of logic. 
I have seemed rather to see the thing as a 
living picture of a divinely human process; this 
picture I have but endeavoured to describe. If 
my words carry any conviction, it will be be- 
cause the process I seek to describe is alive. 
For this very reason it is out of harmony with 
the lifeless, commercial and forensic thought of 
the past. 

The perspective is entirely altered ; it is as 
though I see through a stereoscope what has 



118 Forgiveness and Suffering 

formerly been to me a flat field ; to understand 
the effect of a stereoscope, one must look 
through it. Yet I must try, as best I may, 
to explain the change which it brings about, 
as enhancing, not perverting, the vision of 
things. 

The death of Christ has been commonly 
regarded, not as of a piece with the rest of his 
life, not as the culminating point of his revela- 
tion of God, but as existing, as it were, in 
theological isolation ; a thing by itself ; a bright 
point of light, throwing its dazzling ray across 
space and time, and finding itself, so to speak, 
reflected in the eye of God, rather than having 
its source in Him. Such a view is to me 
frankly impossible ; the theological isolation is 
unthinkable. Christ is the light that lightens 
every man ; yet the rays, which give us light, 
are all derived from the primary Sun. The 
love of Christ is that which warms the heart of 
man ; yet it is but a manifestation in time of 
the timeless love in the heart of God. 

Jesus is fitly described as the express image 
of the person of God ; the whole process of his 
thought and action had its eternal archetype 
and original in the person of the Almighty 



Reflections and Hopes 119 

Father ; from this universal statement we can- 
not isolate his sufferings ; he was still doing that 
which he had seen with his Father. The inter- 
pretation which I have adopted in no way 
tends to evacuate Christ's passion of its specific 
potency ; for that potency is the potency of the 
passion of God, projected on to the screen of 
human life. 

But, you may say, by this explanation the 
significance of Christ's death is wholly sym- 
bolical ; it is not the ultimate thing. Yet, 
though it be not the whole ultimate thing, 
it still may be, and is, a bit of it ; though it 
be a symbol, yet it is a vital part of that which 
it symbolises. 

The sufferings of Christ bear the same re- 
lation to the sufferings of God as the life of 
Christ bears to the life of God. The one is 
an expression and a part of the other. Call it 
a symbol if you will. In a sense the life of 
Christ is a symbol of the life of God. The 
rocket fired from the shore is the symbol of 
safety to the sinking ship ; but it is an effectual 
symbol ; it brings the safety which it sym- 
bolises. It is not the whole of the ultimate 
thing ; yet it, and it alone, makes available to 



120 Forgiveness and Suffering 

the ship the forces which are concentrated on 
the shore. 

So, I take it, if Christ be the incarnate God, 
he is the effectual symbol of all that is available 
for man in the heart of the Eternal ; effectual, 
because the life of Jesus is God's living thought 
expressed to man. Let us beware that we do 
not stifle truth with words ; a symbol, thus 
defined, may be the very heart of reality. 

For all who believe in the Incarnation, the 
whole life of Christ is the manifestation of the 
life of God. For me, the passion of Christ is 
the climax of his life, and is the manifestation 
of the passion of God. The interpretation to 
which I point involves no departure from the 
faith of the Incarnation ; it postulates, while 
it explains, the necessity of Christ's suffering ; 
and it shows a living relation between man the 
sinner, and God the Sufferer. 

But more than this too. For this inter- 
pretation will convey a meaning even to those 
who feel unable to profess a faith in the actual 
Incarnation. For such men, all the commercial 
and forensic theories have no meaning. To 
these I offer this explanation as a symbolism 
of truth ; not to them indeed an effectual, but 



Reflections and Hopes 121 

a suggestive symbolism. They cannot believe 
that Jesus was God ; but nearly all believe 
that he was very like what God must be. To 
such men, I think, this sort of teaching may 
prove intelligible. Though they cannot find in 
Christ the Incarnate God, yet they may find in 
him the way to the Father ; for a Father who 
suffers and forgives is a Father in whom they 
can believe. Of such men and women there 
are multitudes, and they are very near the 
kingdom of heaven ; nearer, I say, by far, than 
many who render easy lip-service to the doctrine 
of the Incarnation. I am not of their num- 
ber, but I know many of them my spiritual 
superiors. The difference between our points 
of view is the difference between effectual and 
suggestive symbolism. To the one Jesus is like 
the divine, to the other he is divine. 

Once again, it may be objected that I have 
represented Christ as bearing and forgiving the 
sins of the men with whom he came in earthly 
contact, so that other men are referred back 
for their forgiveness away from Jesus to God 
the Father. Yet Christ did nothing for the 
men of his own time that he does not do for 
us ; to them and us alike he brought by his 



122 Forgiveness and Suffering 

life the message of God's forgiving love ; and 
I know not what more there was to do. 
Through him alone we and they alike re- 
ceive it. 

I have devoted a few words to save, my 
thesis from misrepresentation. Yet it is not 
my object to reinforce, as it were, an elaborate 
edifice of argument ; my only desire is to en- 
able others to see clearly the living picture as 
I have seen it ; and, alas, the attempt to de- 
scribe in words a vital process seems almost 
fatuous. I can but present it to the best 
of my ability, in the hope that the description 
may conjure up the picture to other minds. 

For, indeed, I cannot but feel that such 
an interpretation of the passion of Christ, if 
it should find acceptance, would exercise an 
incalculable influence for good, not only on 
the Church in particular, but on the world in 
general. 

First, the world. I am convinced that men, 
thoughtful men, are deterred from a frank accept- 
ance of Christianity far more by reason of un- 
moral, unspiritual, untheological hypotheses of 
atonement, which seem to them bound up with the 
Christian religion, than by any actual difficulty 



Reflections arid Hopes 123 

in accepting, in itself, the religion of the In- 
carnation. Give them a moral and spiritual 
view of the atonement, in touch with reason, 
nature, and psychology, and the other difficulties 
will appear, not indeed insignificant, but in 
their proper perspective. 

If now, the passion of Jesus be regarded 
as an unveiling of the heart of God, a recital 
before humanity of the music of the divine 
mind, and not as an artifice or plan to alter that 
mind, or to change the motive of that music — 
then, I am convinced, one of the most powerful 
causes of antipathy against the Christian belief 
will have been removed. My experience may 
be exceptional, but I have certainly met many 
thoughtful men whose minds stick, not at the 
thought of an Incarnation as such, but at the 
irrational and unspiritual ideas of atonement 
which seem to them inseparable from it. That 
the current views of the Atonement should have 
produced such an effect, I consider natural 
and inevitable ; their correction will no less 
naturally and inevitably draw men back to- 
wards the Christian faith. If, for instance, the 
Incarnation be — as it still is in the popular 
mind — in the main the harbinger of a scheme 



124 Forgiveness and Suffering 

of Atonement which leaves much to be desired 
in its ethics and psychology, the tendency must 
be, and undoubtedly is, to reject the Incar- 
nation, not on its own merits, but on the de- 
merits of its supposed object. You cannot 
make an appeal to thoughtful men on behalf of 
Christianity, unless you remove from its sub- 
stance all that grates on sound moral instinct. 
A man's religion cannot clash with his ethics. 
A thorough reconstruction of our theory of 
divine forgiveness must be effected before 
Christianity can come into its own. The faith 
which overcomes the world must be a faith 
whose roots are bedded deep in, and ramify 
through, the soil of our moral consciousness. 
I earnestly commend these few words to the 
consideration of all who desire to impart re- 
ligious teaching, whether to men, women, or 
children. 

But if a doctrine of divine forgiveness, 
which is in touch with life, would have a 
Christianising effect on the outside world, much 
more would it tend to obliterate the artificial 
differences which have sprang up within the 
Church. For while all admit that Jesus in- 
dicated a close connexion between his passion 



Reflections and Hopes 125 

and the forgiveness of sins, yet no clear dis- 
tinction has been drawn between this fact 
and the corollary of a penal or quasi-penal 
satisfaction. 

As a consequence, the self-styled evangelical 
adheres to the substitution theory — watered 
down, indeed, to meet modern exigency, yet 
still in essence the same ; the ethical school, 
on the contrary, rejects this hypothesis as arti- 
ficial, unmoral, and even mythical ; while they 
lay stress on the effect of the love of God in 
Christ on the human heart, as it appeals to 
the religious emotion and instinct, yet they 
shrink from defining any process within the 
heart of God which may have made forgiveness 
possible. The result is, that one party within 
the Church is maintaining a theory which the 
other rejects. What now if the theory in 
question be a mistaken conclusion, wholly un- 
justified by the premisses ? What if the need 
for suffering be an internal psychological 
necessity, inherent in the relation of forgiver 
to forgiven — a necessity not only independent, 
but exclusive of any external or forensic inter- 
pretation ? This, I think, is a matter to be 
pondered by the Evangelical mind. To those, 



126 Forgiveness and Suffering 

on the other hand, who lean to the ethical and 
emotional, as opposed to the theological view, 
I would suggest : What if this necessary suffer- 
ing within the heart of God, be the very thing 
— as it is — which creates the subjective re- 
sponse within the heart of man ? If these 
things be so, then, in the philosophy of for- 
giveness which I have outlined, there may be 
found, not a compromise between two opposing 
views, but a common platform, on to which 
both parties may mount from opposite sides, 
and so find themselves on a higher level of 
common faith and mutual understanding. 

I have endeavoured to shew that there is 
no divergence between Christian religion and 
Christian ethics. Their apparent opposition 
has created a real difficulty ; and I have 
attempted a real solution. Shall we be told 
that such a solution lacks authority, or that it 
differs from the view which the Church has 
held in ages past ? The answer is twofold. No 
authority has put forth any comprehensive 
theory of the Atonement ; hypothesis has suc- 
ceeded hypothesis, each forced on by the felt 
inadequacy of the preceding ; at the present 
time, there is not even a hypothesis which can 



Reflections and Hopes 127 

be said to hold the field. But even if authority 
were all against such a solution, authority is 
not a force which binds our thought, but which 
educates our intelligence. The mind of each 
age trusts its great thinkers ; but another 
generation is heir to the thought of the past, 
and superadds its own contribution ; if it 
were not so, then in every sphere of thought 
humanity would stagnate and progress would 
end. Again, we may be told that New Testa- 
ment writers held no such theory. I admit it. 
It is neither the philosophy of the Pauline 
Epistles, nor even — explicitly at least — of the 
fourth Gospel : but it is in general accord with 
the spirit of all, and does not run counter to 
any of the main features of their religious faith. 
The Pauline philosophy is not the Johannine ; 
the New Testament, as a whole, contains no 
general philosophy of religion ; each age has its 
own philosophy, and each generation must 
think for itself — our own not less but more 
than others. 

The last half-century has witnessed a revo- 
lution of thought which dwarfs even that of 
the Reformation period. The work of science 
has forcibly altered our entire outlook on the 



128 Forgiveness and Suffering 

world. It has revolutionised our view of 
history ; it has forced us into a new philo- 
sophy of life. We have swung round to quite 
another point of view, deeper, fuller, and 
truer than that which we have left behind. Our 
religious outlook must needs participate in the 
change ; for we cannot divide our mind into 
watertight compartments. 

Through science the whole world has be- 
come to us, not indeed understood, but in- 
telligible ; and with this has come the con- 
viction that our religious faith too, must come 
to be expressed in intelligible terms. This is 
the task of our generation ; woe to us if we do 
not face it with a reverent courage. 



EPILOGUE 

I have said that each age has its own 
philosophy of religion. To some this may seem 
a hard saying ; yet it is true. The foundation, 
indeed, of all Christian philosophy must always 
be the love of God ; but the foundation is not 
the superstructure. We cannot continue to live 
in the spiritual houses of our ancestors ; like 
material houses, they need adaptation, or even, 
in the long course of time, reconstruction. 

Every man's religious philosophy is the house 
in which he lives, and from which he takes 
his outlook on the world. This edifice is his 
real home. To it he returns in his quiet hours. 
He, and he alone, knows its every nook and 
cranny, its attractions and its inconveniences. 
Of such houses, whether they be good or bad, 
and of those who live in them, consists the City 
of God in this world. 

And it is well called a City ; for it bears a 

D. w. 9 



130 Forgiveness and Suffering 

close analogy to the houses of brick and mortar 
which we build for our bodies. Each kind of 
City has its architects, and each its history of 
architecture, varying in every age with the 
needs and aspirations of its citizens. 

In this City all of us live who have any 
religion at all. During our early years most of 
us live in our parents' houses ; later on, some 
of us inherit and live on in them ; they may not 
be modern, but they are generally solid, or at 
least less flimsy than the jerry-built house in a 
modern street. But if we live in these older 
houses, we must keep them fresh ; we must 
have enough windows to let in the light of 
modern knowledge, and open too, to admit the 
fresh air of modern thought. In these old 
houses there is a special danger of insanitary 
conditions ; dry rot, damp, and drainage all 
have their spiritual counterparts. 

On account of the inconvenience, and often 
the ugliness, of the older houses, many of us 
prefer to build new dwellings ; but here also 
we encounter difficulties. Good architects are 
few ; and unless we can be our own architects, 
we must choose our adviser with care. In 
these days houses are built in rows, without 



Epilogue 131 

attention to the special requirements of the in- 
dividual ; you must take it or leave it. And 
with the best architect, you will have to check 
his design to your own need ; it is you, not he, 
who will have to live in the house. Well then, 
you say, let us each build on our own plan. 
But here also, beware. If you wish to be 
your own architect, you must study archi- 
tecture ; otherwise you will be leaving out the 
staircase. 

In spite of drawbacks, the citizens are all 
housed somehow ; many of them are dissatisfied 
with their dwellings, yet have not the time, or 
skill, or material with which to make altera- 
tions ; some of them flit from house to house ; 
but these have no abiding home. And some, 
alas, live in old tumble-down houses, which are 
incapable of restoration, because it is too much 
trouble to move. 

The City presents a vast diversity of struc- 
tural style ; some houses are both old and 
beautiful, but now unsound ; some are elaborate 
modern buildings, but few of them are beau- 
tiful. The City is conglomerate of many 
centuries, and its architects are of every 
nation. 



132 Forgiveness and Suffering 

Storms visit the City at intervals. Great 
tempests came upon it some three eenturies 
ago ; since then the whole City has been re- 
built ; the style was mostly new, but part was 
rebuilt on the old design. And now for fifty 
years the City has been tunnelled in all 
directions, and the shaking of modern traffic 
does not make for the stability of houses. 
Truly, the problems are great and difficult ; 
yet they have to be faced squarely by the 
men of our generation. 

In this great City, reader, you and I both 
have our abode. Do you live in a house in- 
herited from your parents ? See to it that it 
is sound and up to date, with the requirements 
of spiritual health. Or are you building for 
yourself? Then build with caution. Primarily, 
indeed, you are building for yourself; you are 
providing your own home, fixing your own 
outlook. Yet no man builds for himself alone ; 
your children will be brought up in the same 
house, and with the same outlook ; your friends 
too, in a lesser degree, cannot fail to experience, 
for good or evil, the influence of your archi- 
tecture on their own. 

In these pages I have tried to suggest some 



Epilogue 133 

principles of sound building ; I have found 
them good for myself, and they may prove 
useful to others. It is only with such a hope 
that I send out this little book to take its 
chance of catching once and again a sympa- 
thetic eye, and of helping perhaps a few who 
are in need of help. 



CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



Some books published by 
The Cambridge University Press 

The Interregnum. Twelve Essays on Religious Doubt. 
By R. A. P. Hill, B.A., M.D. Crown 8vo. 4 s 6d net. 

"There is a stage in a man's mental development when the old 
beliefs and sanctions of childhood are lost and he has not had time to 
form new views of his own. That stage is called by Dr Hill The 
Interregnum ; and under that title he has written a book ' to enable 
such men to mix sympathetically with Christian men even while 
conscious that their own opinions on many vital matters are as yet 
unformed.' The author's most desirable purpose will be fulfilled. 
The book is written so un technically that the least thoughtful person 
will enjoy the reading of it. And to read it is to obtain light and 
steadying. His advice is ' Hold fast that thou hast,' but it is expressed 
so wisely, and illustrated so well , that in the very act of accepting it a 
young man will obtain fuller understanding than he possesses, and 
surer footing." — Expository Times 

Evolution and the Need of Atonement. By Stewart 

A. McDowall, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge, Assistant Master 
at Winchester College. Crown 8vo. 3s net. 

"The Dean of Westminster in a prefatory note speaks of this as 
'a remarkable little book,' and unquestionably the writer has dealt 
with a perennial problem in a manner both striking and original.... 
The book is in a high degree suggestive and stimulating, and may be 

heartily commended Mr MacDowall shows, with real ability and 

insight, that man's history, viewed from the biological standpoint, 
necessarily involves the fact of atonement for sin. The book deserves 
to be widely and carefully read." — Oxford Magazine 

The Origin and Propagation of Sin. Being the Hulsean 

Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in 1 901-2. 
By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Second edition. Crown 8vo. 
3s 6d net. 

"His four lectures are able, well-informed, and closely reasoned, 
and are written in an admirable style — An able and honest attempt to 
face the problem in the light of modern knowledge." — Glasgow Herald 

The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original 

Sin. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Demy 8vo. 9s net. 

" The purpose of this very learned work is to trace the origin or 
the doctrines of the Fall and of original sin in the form which they 
ultimately assumed in St Augustine and, through his influence, in all 
subsequent Western theology — Medieval, Catholic, and Protestant.... 
We feel no hesitation in treating Mr Tennant's book with profound 

respect His book exhibits great learning as well as sound judgement 

and good sense.... No more important piece of work has been done by 
an English scholar for some time past." — Times 

continued overleaf 



The Concept of Sin. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. 

Crown 8vo. 4s 6d net. 

"Dr Tennant argues the question skilfully and logically, minimis- 
ing no difficulties and overlooking no essential facts. He approaches 
his subject with no bias in favour of the views sanctioned by traditional 
theology, and his simple definition will commend itself to all right- 
thinking men. The book is a notable contribution to a much neglected 
subject, should help to revive an interest in a most important point of 
Christian ethics, and will prove most useful and helpful as a handbook 
for theological students." — Aberdeen Journal 

The Moral Life and Moral Worth. By W. R. Sorley, 

Litt.D. Royal i6mo. Cloth, is net; leather, 2s 6d net. Cambridge 
Manuals Series. 

"A happy task happily performed. An immense amount of moral 
philosophy is here compressed into a small compass, and in a manner 
so lucid and attractive as to deserve a large circle of readers." — School 
World 

The Idea of God in early religions. By Dr F. B. 

Jevons. Royal i6mo. Cloth, is net; leather, 2s 6d net. Cambridge 
Manuals Series. 

"This is a small book, but it contains plenty of food for reflection. 
Professor Jevons has managed to pack a great deal of thought-com- 
pelling matter into this volume of 160 pages. Altogether the book is 
one to ponder very carefully : it is, in many ways, an admirable piece 
of religious apologetic." — Record 

Comparative Religion. By the same author. Royal i6mo. 

Cloth, is net ; leather, 2s 6d net. Cambridge Manuals Series. 

"This is an admirable introduction to an important subject. Dr 
Jevons is a recognized authority, and has compressed into 150 small 
pages a great deal of solid information. This is just the book for the 
man who wants to know what Comparative Religion is all about, and 
how a Christian should regard the other great faiths of the world." 

Guardian 

The History of the English Bible. By John Brown, 

D.D. Royal i6mo. With 10 plates. Cloth, is net; leather, 2s 6d 
net. Cambridge Manuals Series. 

"It is just such a model of intimate scholarship, handled with 
simple skill, as we have learnt to expect from Dr Brown. He shows 
clearly how, from the Anglo-Saxon metrical versions right up to the 
Revised Version, new needs and opportunities led naturally to ever- 
growing perfection." — Christian World 

Cambridge University Press 

Fetter Lane, London C. F. Clay, Manager 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnoloqies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



fi 



